I know there are a solid amount of taxidermy/dead critter enthusiasts on here, hopefully some of you can help me out. My boss went hunting recently and he gave me his cow elk hide the other day. The goal is to turn it into a buckskin braintan style. I'm pretty proficient at skinning stuff now, but I suck ass at fleshing and I don't have a fleshing beam, so I'm doing everything with my skinning knives. I've never worked such a big animal and I've been having to tackle the thing little bits at a time. And I have a ton of questions for experienced people:

How long can I keep soaking the hide in water before it starts to rot? I got this hide on Saturday, so I've had it for nearly three whole days. The hide came to me both frozen and extremely salted. I soaked it for about 2 hours on Monday, but it was still pretty stiff, so I soaked it again all of that night. All the main fat and meat chunks are off now, but there are still some tough patches of fat and quite a bit of membrane. Also, I've been reading about having to buck elk hides, which means making wood ash lye. How long does this take? How much ash to distilled water do you need and how long do you soak the hide?

I guess those are my main questions for now. I've successfully brained rabbit hides (fur on though), but I never got to the final smoking process and they're kind of stiff now. I don't really have a local mentor for this sort of stuff, so I've been relying on the internet and experiments to figure all of this out. Luckily I have plenty of little rabbit hides to practice on and totally ruin. You guys should see my freezer...

Any help at all is GREATLY appreciated. Learning old crafts, especially anything that involves using every part of an animal, is extremely important to me. Thanks!