I went to clean skinning as a matter of economics for my own line's efficiency. I generally spent the better part of an hour skinning a beaver rough, then breaking my back and oftentimes the quality of the pelt trying to flesh it on a hard wood beam. I watched a demo on clean-skinning, and then sort of self-taught myself from there after that. I now spend less time than I did on each pelt before, but still takes me at least an hour a pelt. But, when I am finished I don't have to break my back or arms over a fleshing beam, I can move right over to the stretcher board and start laying out demensions and a handfull of small nails. Its a much more pleasant and timely process for me, and the buyer seems to prefer the pelts that aren't so beat up from agressive fleshing techniques.
I haven't tried the trough table you mention in your post, though. I just have an old base kitchen cabinet with a decently-sized countertop still attached. The cabinet portion below is a nice place to store the knives, combs, tail zippers, and any other fur shed goodies I need. The top is washable, tough, and provides enough surface area to lay certain specimans on to skin out, namely rats, mink, and beaver. (all the others such as coons and predators get skinned out by hanging from my various gambrel systems).
The trough is an interesting concept to keep floppy, big beavers from moving around on the area you are working on, though. Sometimes I use a small clamp on one edge of this countertop and I can put a beaver tail in that to keep them in position. Other than that, this old kitchen counter I use has seen an awful lot of beaver on it and I just can't see myself going to a lot of effort to modify my setup unless I am convinced of a "better mousetrap" so to speak. Could you (or others?) share some more info with me on this trough-type beaver skinning setup? I'm intrigued by the concept...lay them in, work on one side, then turn them a bit and keep working. Sounds like a great setup.
