Outdoorsmen Adventures.com

Bill Graves’ garage is a long ways from the great hall of an European baronial estate.

There is no huge fireplace where a flickering fire lights up the walls revealing medieval weapons of war and glittering skulls and antlers of red deer and moose .

Nope. Here there’s just a refrigerator full of beer, a wall full of hunting and fishing photos and a stainless steel table and sink where deer are butchered every winter by Graves and his many deer hunting friends.

It’s not until you notice the back wall cluttered with deer skulls and racks of all sizes that you begin to get a feel for the medieval.

It’s here that Graves, Rob Blades, both of Sioux City, Kevin Horsley, Lawton, and Tracy Nelson of Salix have perfected a method of producing top quality European deer mounts.

An European-style deer mount consists of a deer’s skull, minus the jawbone mounted against a wooden plaque. The skull is bleached white and the antlers are polished to a rich luster.

“We learned this by just playing around,” Graves said. “Then, we thought why not do this as a business and offer local hunters a quality mount for a lot less money than it would require for a full-shoulder mount.

“In fact, we’re doing them for $75 each,” he said.

And, since he and his friends are avid turkey hunters, they decided to offer turkey fans and

other turkey trophies as well.

Graves, a licensed taxidermist, says they boil the skulls to remove all the meat. It is an exacting and long process which few other taxidermists do. In fact, most taxidermists ship the heads to “beetle farms” where larval insects make short work of it.

But bleaching the skulls pure white is not easy.

“I have come up with a secret process that does an excellent job of that,” Graves said.

“The process is so good that the whitening takes place all the way through the bone which insures the skull will not yellow with age as can happen with bleached bones.

“Were not into this to get rich,” Rob Blades said. “We’re just a bunch of guys who enjoy getting together and working on these projects.”

The heads are boiled in propane turkey cookers. It can take 5 to 6 hours on average and then there’s another couple of hours picking and cleaning.

The skulls can be mounted on the wall or on a variety of plaques which are available.

They can whiten the skulls or offer them painted in various colors. They also have a process that allows them to reproduce a photo on the skull.

To check out their work and for more information on what they can do, check out their Web site at: http//triplebskulls.shutterfly.com/

For information, call Bill at (712) 251-4459 or (712) 276-0821.

“Not everyone wants a full-shoulder mount of every buck they kill,” Graves said. “After all, that costs a lot of money. However, with an European mount they can have a momento of their hunt for very little cost.”

Oh, there’s one great advantage to European mounts. The antlers look much larger.