The learning curve

We all know a learning curve is the correlation of trying something the first time and the number of attempts to do really well at it. Sometimes urgency demands we figure out how to get good at something really quickly other times it takes great patience and many tries to get it right. 
My latest experience with this is cleaning beaver skulls. I have a few in the freezer from a trapper I know. And last year was not a good year to get them all boiled and cleaned and ready for painting, but this is the summer it will happen and is happening.
Now I have been boiling and cleaning lynx skull for a couple of years and have gotten pretty good at making quick work of the job especially after they have been boiling about 90 minutes.
Now beaver are certainly a different critter. I have bought precleaned/bleached skull of these treee eaters so I thought I was somewhat familiar with their heads. 
90 minute is not enough time to soften all the connective tissue and cartilage in a beaver skull. 2 and half hours is not enough. A 3 hour minimum and then make sure they are well cover with water the whole time.
I also figured out to separate the bottom jaw from the top and clean it first. The collagen congeals if it cools down and it becomes more difficult to separate from the bone. The bottom jaw will split in half as the connective tissue holding the two halves together will get soft enough. 
When working with the top half I remove the large slabs of meat first and then scrape the joints and stuff in back.
The tree eaters seem to be built with way more shock absorbers than lynx have so there are more bones that are a little less fused or kept as semi separate sections. More bumps and more holes.
I now clean out the brain and nasal areas quickly in the process and so many of the holes seem to lead to these two areas.
OK enough of this detail. I know few people ever will need this info.
My thoughts about this whole endeavor in general. I clean these skulls because I use them in my art. Buying them cleaned gets expensive quickly.
I can get them raw from local hunters much cheaper. However they do take up room in the freezer all winter since I do boil them outside.
I boil them outside because everything I read about doing this said it smells bad.
I think it is not that so much as we feel like they should smell bad. Or else an aversion to cooking something you have no intention of eating in a kitchen space.
For myself I use an old rice cooker and a burner under the pan outside because I have no room to cook 3-4 skulls in a pot at a time.
Dental tools are amazing. especially scrapers that let you get to bare bone without damaging the bone but get rid of clinging tissue.
If you run across this and you are looking to clean a beaver skull I hope these notes help shorten your learning curve.