Skinning a Deer with an Air Compressor
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About the Author: NC Scout
NC Scout is the nom de guerre of a former Infantry Scout and Sergeant in one of the Army’s best Reconnaissance Units. He has combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He teaches a series of courses focusing on small unit skills rarely if ever taught anywhere else in the prepping and survival field, including his RTO Course which focuses on small unit communications. In his free time he is an avid hunter, bushcrafter, writer, long range shooter, prepper, amateur radio operator and Libertarian activist. He can be contacted at [email protected] or via his blog at brushbeater.wordpress.com .
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GUNS N GEAR
We’ve done this with goats the last couple of processing days. Works well
Compressed air comes from a pump. Pumps lubricate with petroleum products so they will continue to pump. A certain amount of that oil aerosolizes and exits with the air. Learn to use a F&%$#( knife and keep your meat clean….or not. Shortcuts rarely yield the best results. And you miss an opportunity to practice your stabbing and cutting skills to boot.
R
Deer are pretty easy to skin, but I can sure as hell see using air on a squirrel. Those little bastards want to keep their hides.
I hate skinning squirrels.
You can use the compressor trick on squirrels too. Don’t gut them first. Clamp exit hole shut. Pressurize through entrance hole. Don’t wear clean cloths when skinning. Stay out of the way of the eye balls when pressurizing. Remove skin. Takes about 2 minutes per squirrel. 3-5 minutes for a deer. If you don’t gut them first, the whole hide inflates like in “over the hedge”.
Nice!
Interesting concept but I was disappointed he waited two weeks. I just skin the day after and if it’s too cold (which hasn’t been a thing here as of late during whitetail season), a portable space heater thaws them out in short order.
If you’re worried about hair on the skin, a blowtorch selectively applied works nicely.
Finally, there is a device that can skin your deer without having to gut it beforehand but that may be more trouble than it’s worth since it has to be gutted regardless.
Tech we use is to raise a flap of hide. Wrap the flap around a rock the size of a golf balll and tie off connnect tie to your truck wench. With deer elevated start wench, hide off in minutes.
I’ve done it this way a lot. We actually did it with a golf ball.
That was good, never even heard of this. Compressed air can be dangerous, if pressure is high enough. ER nurse who gave us a first aid class told us they got a lot of painters in, who using compressed air, would get paint injected under the skin, and they would have to peel back the skin, and clean paint out of the muscle underneath.
2.5
haha! my father in law uses a hand pump (looks like a 4x oversized bicycle pump) to do the very thing when we slaughter goats or sheep, make an incision on one of the legs and start pumping, it lifts the whole skin off of the body and then removing it is a piece of cake. Go slow to avoid the tougher spots sticking and possibly tearing. I’d think a hand pump would work better than a compressor as one has finer control over the pressure.