#degreasing

[pacificremains]

The prettiest degrease soup

[bonespired]

How to degrease bones? (With the easiest and cheapest method!)

Bone cleaning is quite a journey - and honestly degreasing is the part I find a tad confusing. Questions like: how long it will take? Does it work in cold water as well? Is it done? Is it doing anything at all?

As a beginner bone collector, who also doesn't want to put a huge amount of money into it and finding an acceptable way to clean bones is essential. Mainly because of the challenge, - tbh it is quite enjoyable for me to create quality bones with a less amount of investment, it just makes me feel like I really worked for it, I love these challenges - but mostly because it is already difficult to make my family accept this kind of a hobby of mine. Not many people are fond of keeping rotting animal parts at home, I can tell you that! If this hobby turns out to be stinky and expensive, that is definitely a no from family members. And even though I am an adult, making my own money, my husband does have a saying about the family funds - because we are both responsible for this family - so it is important for me to keep things at a reasonable price.

There are many ways to degrease bones and you have to pay a price for it either way, be it about the time period the degreasing takes or the used materials. You can degrease bones chemically, using liquids like ammonia or acetone, but personally, I dislike these, because:

it requires some effort to put your hand on this stuff, they can be hard to come by

they can be harmful to your health (ammonia is not nice to work with)

they can be expensive, and we already have to buy H2O2

they have to be stored and get rid of properly - you cannot just let these go down in your sink

and some materials can be straightforward and dangerous - read about some pros are using stuff like petrol for degreasing and while it does the job, petrol is extremely unstable, highly flammable and tend to blow up easily, so super no!

So, I go with the safest and also the cheapest solution: dish soap.

Dish soap is something that is easy to come by, can be super cheap and the water system is well prepared to clean grey water, so you can pour dish soap into your sink. However, it can take time to degrease your bones. While ammonia or acetone can be done with degreasing under a day (depends on the size of the skull and species of the animal), dish soap takes a lot longer: days at the best, months at the worst. But this is also the easiest degreasing method for beginners.

But there is another big question: how do you know your degreasing is working (and when it is done)?

When I started to even think about degreasing I went online, read about dish soap and was happy because everyone has dish soap at hand, so I picked a pot, filled it with cold water, pour the dish soap in, put the bones in and yay, magic was done! But things are not this simple.

The first days everything went fine: my water had fat oil drops at the surface and a visible white cloud came out of the bones, so a clear sign of the degreasing is working. But this stage went down quickly, like a matter of days - and I thought okay, degreasing is done, time to pull the skulls out and whiten. But my whitening never turned out white, rather like light grey and first I blamed my peroxide because of it, then my bones. These are findings from nature, probably they are stained, right?

I started to be doubtful when my cat skull turned out to be sticky after whitening. That never happened before, so another research later I came to the conclusion the cat that I thought are fully degreased is actually not degreased. But it didn't do a thing in the pot anymore. So what did I do wrong?

I used cold water. Apparently cold water works, but only for a while. It cannot really pull out the grease that is hiding deep inside the bone - that's why I stopped seeing white cloud after a matter of days, falsely thinking I am done. I needed warm water in the long run - if I simply use warm tap water that just runs cold way too quickly. It can be done with warm tap water as well, but that takes even longer. So, I bought an aquarium heater.

I looked after the fat oil drops in the water. They appeared on the first day, so I thought they will keep appearing until I am done. Turns out they don't? Rather the water slowly goes more opaque and murky with time, but no more fat drops don't matter how hard I am looking for them. This makes my job significantly difficult because oil drops are easier to spot and tell based on them if the degreasing is working or if I am actually done.

I am just super imapetient. I want my skull done and perfect as soon as possible. But it just doesn't work like that. I am working on this cat skull for 3 weeks now and it is still going: I had to macerate it, then degrease it, then whiten it, and then go back to degreasing and all I wanna do is glue it together and post fancy pictures of it. Won't happen for a while, time to accept that.

But how this opaque water progress looks like? I was so confused about is it clear water, is it dirty water, is it done, whether the water is warm enough or not, so I started to document the process.

This is the freshwater stage. I just changed the water and quickly snapped a pic of it, making it my reference piece. I can clearly see all the details of my bones, even if my dish soap is yellow, colouring my water a bit - but I can see through the water without any problem. My heater can do 36 Celsius degrees max, otherwise, it cooks the fish in the tank, so I put that on max, hoping it will be enough. About the temperature: I did read about 46 Celsius or even more than 50 Celsius for water temperature, but the aquarium heater cannot reach those degrees, because the main goal is to keep fish alive and no fish stays alive in 40+ water. I could use a bucket heater, but for me, that is harder to get and I really don't want a setting that takes a lot of space/costs a lot of money, so an aquarium heater it is.

Another thing I am not comfortable to put my bones in more than 50 Celsius degrees. This is my personal choice, but I really wanna avoid any chance of accidentally cooking my bones, and 50 seems to be too much heat.

I looked back at it an hour later and snapped another pic: and look, we start to get blurry details! No oil drops on the surface, but something definitely makes the water murky: my water is not hot enough to cook the bones, so it cannot dissolve or take any kind of damage in my bones, so this stuff must be grease! Seems like the heater works!

Checked the bones that evening as well and the water is definitely even more opaque!

And this is the next day: I can barely see my bones anymore, so definitely time to change the water.

Conclusion

If you think you are done with your bones, but they:

have yellow spots or wax on them

stick to your hand like you glued them

are shining here or there

have a waxy feeling

smells

Then your degreasing is not done. The good news is you can always go back to degreasing, doesn't matter if you whitened the bones or not.

The cheapest version of degreasing is the dish soap version and you will need warm water for it! It can be a good idea to get an aquarium heater because that will help you to macerate carcasses during the winter as well and quickens degreasing too. You can work with warm tap water, but that takes even longer.

But the dish soap method really takes time! Seems like this part is the longest one in skull cleaning. So even if it seems like my degreasing is not over and my method works, I can also see I won't have a pretty white cat skull anytime soon.

The bones are bathing for the third day in a row now and they seem to release the same amount of grease, so no sign of clear water yet. Also, when I pull the bones out of the water I can still see yellow spots on it - that is grease, sweeping to the surface and I need to get rid of that.

And how I will know my degreasing is done? My water stops being opaque. I can decide when to pull my bones out - do I want to fully degrease it or I decide to end it sooner because I want some discolouration, preserving am roe natural look.... that is up to me. Ideally, I wanna do a full degrease, but I just wanna preserve my bones perfectly to have quality art references that will be with be for a long time, so I try to go for a full degrease and will see how long that takes.

So just take your time, change your water as needed and enjoy the process :3 You cannot harm your bones this way, so happy experimenting!

[boundless-ennui]

My process takes forever because I refuse to sell greasy bones. I'll be feeling each of these by hand to see if any are done degreasing (probably not) and then moving forward accordingly.

Any I don't use I will sell and I refuse to sell bones that aren't up to snuff. I hate when people do that, especially as jewelry pieces.

[sabbathbloodys4bb4th]

edit: all sorted now!!! thank you guys :3

hi vultures, i need some help o.O

i had some bones degreasing and i finally worked up the courage to change the water and to my shock they are stained. i live in an area with hard water and i don’t have any filters on my hose so it must’ve been from that. i’ve been able to degrease and clean bones before, but i waited too too long to change the water :((

wondering if there is any hope left for these guys, if you know any tricks to get them cleaned up i’d really like to hear them since there are at least 30+ bones in here, including some im cleaning for a friend.

[blackbackedjackal]

This may be a dumb question but how do you know if bone needs degreasing vs if bone needs whitening. What does it look like?

Not a dumb question at all! It's just very situational.

It's pretty uncommon for bones to only need to be whitened to be fully cleaned. The main example I can think of would be nature cleaned bones. Most of the time if the bones look white or mostly clean with just bit of dirt or dried tissue left on them, they can just be soaked in peroxide for a couple days and that be the only cleaning they need. The peroxide will sanitize the bones and dissolve small bits of dried tissue. Otherwise, it's best to go through the processes of degreasing and whitening to make sure the bones are clean. The spectrum of grease stains in bones is so vast that sometimes it's difficult to tell which process to start with.

For example, between these two images, which one looks like it needs to be degreased and whitened vs which one only needs to be whitened?

Just going off the colors, most people would assume the left doesn't require much to any extra cleaning, and the right still needs to be degreased.

However, the wolf skull on the left was boiled and bleached, and had grease locked into the skull that had to be cleaned. Here's how it looked after a few weeks of degreasing. The grease that was baked into the bone from the heat damage has resurfaced at this point:

The right image is two fox skulls I cleaned for a client. They were both macerated and had already been degreased in a mixture of ammonia and water by the time I took that photo. This is how one looked after a couple days in peroxide:

And here's the same wolf from above before I put it in the peroxide to whiten. The skull is devoid of grease and mostly cleaned, just needed to be sanitized by the peroxide to be considered clean.

In general, it's best to degrease and whiten any bones you're not certain have been fully cleaned when you find or purchase them. The natural grease won't harm the bones in any way but it can be rather smelly or make the bones feel oily to the touch if the grease is excessive. A light soak in dish soap and water for a few weeks and then a day in some peroxide is usually enough to make the bones display quality. It's more about sanitizing them just to make sure they're clean and the color or quality is up to your own personal preference.

[flayote]

scraping fat/grease out of a shaved cat hide. doing this before the degrease bath helps significantly in fully degreasing the hide, which is essential for the tan to work properly. you’d be surprised how much fat can be lurking within a perfectly clean looking skin!

[bonecorn]

Soapy bone bucket aesthetic shots

[knick-knack-hobbies]

Two greasy bois