Hey all,
I have several beaver pelts that have already been tanned that I would like to get made into a beaver bed spread/blanket for my wife. I would like to get the hides plucked/sheared first but cannot find anyone that does it anymore. I have already spoken to Foxx fur, Moyle Mink and Sleepy Creek, as well as a few furriers.

Can anyone point me in the right direction here?

From what I understand is that once they are tanned they can not be plucked and sheared properly but then I do know of someone who uses a sheep shears to shear the hide once it has been tanned. Don't know how well that works since it has not been plucked.

20scout is correct, you can’t properly pluck a hide once it has been tanned, however it can be sheared. I don’t recommend it though, I had a beaver hide that I wanted to experiment with and used sheep shears to shear it. The underfur became exposed and was as soft as can be but! Because it wasn’t plucked the coarser guard hair creates an effect a lot like razor stubble and was pokey, because of that it completely negated how nice the sheared fur was.

I use a Chinese machine that cuts the guard hair real short but doesn't do anything with the down hair. The result is silky soft down hair without any of the prickly stubble that you get with regular shearing. You can leave it as is or shear to the desired length. Works on tanned or raw furs, sheared or intact. Works on otter and mink, too.


here's what's left after using it. Just the guard hair.


Here's how it works on a commercially sheared beaver. The area to the right from the pencil is processed and there is no stubble visible, compared to the left (there are a few loose guard hairs on the right because I hadn't shaken it off when I took the picture). The overall texture becomes smoother for some reason, probably because guard hair grows in scattered tufts and imparts some sort of texture on the down hair, which disappears once it's clipped out.


Big late-season beaver with long down hair look funny when processed this way, like little brown lambskins, and are super nice to the touch.

What’s the name of the machine you use?

It's an $8 hair trimmer made by Xiaomi, called Enchen Boost I just had a few damaged tanned beaver skins and this trimmer was at hand and I just got curious. I wanted to see if I could use it to shear them, but to my surprise it only cut out the guard hair and wouldn't cut the down hair no matter how I tried. Almost too good to be true I tested it on a bunch of other furs including muskrat and sable and it worked. It's a bit tedious to use because it requires multiple brushing/grooming motions against the grain to completely trim out the guard hair, but pretty foolproof and I've found that it's virtually impossible to damage the underfur using it. It will snip out a small tuft of underfur here and there, but negligibly little. I've processed a couple of whole skins and a big bag of scraps this way to make a lap blanket. Commercial processes would probably requre something more powerful but if you just need to process a few skins, it's perfect. You can probably "pluck" several in one hour using this method.