Daniel,  We are a research lab and do 99% animal tissue.  For our mouse
tissue, we use a shorter run.  Normally, we do 30 minutes in each station,
and have 4 parafffin bathes on our VIP.  The thing we found that is the
very best solution is to not use alcohols or xylenes, both which make mouse
tissue brittle and dry.  We use Richard Allen Flex 100 for our dehydrants
and use them in graded bathes.  We rotate bottles so after the first day,
it is graded down by itself.  The last bottle is always fresh when we
change solutions.  For the clearants, we use Pro Par from Ana Tech.  Again
this is always changed with the new solution going in the third bottle.
Wonderful stuff for animal tissue as it doesn't dry things out.  The
paraffin we use is Surgipath, and use infiltration on the VIP and the
embedding formula for embeddingI   I hope this helps you as it works very
good for us.  When we do rat tissue we just increase the time schedule,
usually to an hour in each bath.
   Karen Dulany
   Eppley Institute for Cancer Research
   Omaha, Ne