.

We use good heavy plastic buckets for most all of our work. Long term exposure to UV outdoors will break down plastic before you want it too. I don't do much outdoors unless it is covered or in an enclosure to protect from the elements. We only do fish oil work outdoors for the most part and we do dozens of buckets over the course of a season.

We cover with heavy mil black plastic to help increase the solar effect to work batches faster and it helps with fly access also. We have a commercial fly spray the protects and kills flies in seconds once they sponge a treated area. Great stuff. Really helps to prevent maggots getting into your batches.

Indoors you can get many many years from good plastic buckets or containers. Glass is much too fragile to work with in any size volume that we do here. Too many accidents can happen. I have some buckets dated into the late 1980's with seasoned glands and lure that is for special formulation work.

Glass is great for small batches of personal use product but not real practical for a commercial operation due to potential breakage. We use some glass but not a lot.

I used a plastic gallon jug to make BTO last summer. I put it out sometime around March and collected my oil in the fall. The jug is still outside and I have not seen any problems with it.

I recycle peanut butter jars for bait. Work well until you drop one when it's cold.

I still prefer glass gallon jars for making bto its considerabley faster gallon glass jars compared side by side with 2 gallon black plastic buckets 2-1 that's draws of top oil. the glass seams to make a better oil as well. for bait containers I like the half gallon plastic mayonnaise jugs extra wide mouth with handles on the side,Lids give out before the container does. for transporting bto I like half pint whiskey bottles glass or plastic no preference

I use 1 gallon glass pickle jars to make individual batches of bait, but use 5 gallon buckets to make BTO. Once the tail oil is rendered down it goes into glass pint jars. Baits go into plastic pint containers. Once the beaver tail chunks aren't producing very much oil I grind them up and put all into a 5 gallon bucket, add some extra ingredients, allow them to age and put into pint jars as needed. I have some 5 gallon buckets that have horse hoof lure in them that are several years old and I haven't seen any problems with them at all. Same with chunked up carp. I agree with Mr. Jameson that exposure to UV rays will break down the buckets pretty fast. I do leave my BTO buckets out during the summer, but only during the summer and store them in the root cellar over the winter. My buddy keeps me well supplied in buckets so I always have replacements if need be.

What would be some ingrediates to add to ground beaver tails?

Castor is the #1 ingredient, maybe some saq oil. I don't add a lot as the tail pieces are very attractive as they are.

I may be missing something. I made my first batch of BTO this past summer. There were no chunks left. It was a liquid sludge.

did you chunk up your tails or grind them? I chunk mine into 1" squares and even after 4 years rendering still have sizable chunks

worm the oil you get from later batchs smells best to me, but those ground up tails does do a number on predators

I have three batches going all the time, plus the new stuff from the current year. I use my hatchet and chop the tails up and really don't try to make them any particular size. Once a batch isn't making much oil I will combine them with the previous years (or the year before that if the previous years tail is still producing) leftovers and grind all when I get time. I have at times just used it straight out of the bucket with out grinding or adding anything to it and had very good results on both fox and coyotes. I should have said before that these tails are always making oil, but if its not making enough to strain off the other liquid then that's when I will consider it time to make into bait. It should also be mentioned that the watery liquid can be used as a liquid bait or trailing scent. I try to never waste anything. To cheap. If a person doesn't have much tail chunks they can also add their leftover chunks to meat baits to add a little kick to it.