9.0 - Head Furring
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From: Lex Nakashima
Subj: Laying fur onto stuff

Re: putting fur on stuff: A lot of this depends on what the "stuff" is. It is difficult to hair-punch into a thick latex mask (as you have already discovered). [by the way: it will significantly increase the strength of your mask if, after you main slush coats, you put a final layer of latex-soaked burlap or cloth on the inside of the mask. This also helps to give the mask a little more lateral strength.]

There are four main techniques that I know of: Fur-laying (yes, yes, very funny), flocking, gluing, and hair punching.

(Note: Lex's messages continue, in the first part of each section, before more items are added.)

When furring, you need to remember where the fur flows.
- Away from the nose and eyes, upwards between the eyes
- Towards the back of the head, and down to the neck
- earfur will flow upwards

9.1 - Gluing
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Gluing is simple: using a thick adhesive/cloth glue like Barge (remember your respirator), you attach pieces of fun fur or NFT to the mask.

Advantages: simple and fast.
Drawbacks:little subtlety, loss of mask detail, poor movement (for mechanical heads).

From: BennetFox
Ya know back in the upholstery shop, we used 3M 8080 General Trim Adhesive. This stuff would stick anything to anything and still be quite flexible since it was a rubbery-based adhesive.

Try also;
- Household GOOP, found in craft and hardware stores in tubes
- 3M's 77 or 74
- Weldwood contact cement, found in hardware stores, either gel or liquid

9.2 - Fur-laying
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Fur laying: there are two ways to do this: The first involves taking some short fun-fur and a piece of nylon or thin cloth and putting a layer of glue on it, then laying the fun-fur on that (MAKE SURE YOU COMBED THE FUR SMOOTH BEFORE LAYING IT ON THE FABRIC!). Then take a razor and carefully cut the backing away from the fur. This part takes some skill, because you want to cut the fur fairly evenly. Once you've done this, you end up with a small piece of material with a flat layer of fur on it. You then cut and glue this onto the piece to be covered. The alternative technique is to lay the fur directly onto the mask (or whatever). The advantage with the first style (laying the fur onto an interim material first) is that if you make a mistake, you haven't messed up your mask. The only real reason to use the direct method is if you are laying fur onto a foam latex piece with mechanical movements (there's more flexibility with out the additional backing).

Advantages: Looks lots better than gluing fun-fur onto the mask (the fur lays flatter, more delicately), and almost as good as flocking or punching, and feels nice. Drawbacks: messy (but not as messy as flocking), requires a little skill with the razor when you cut the fur from the backing (BTW, in this instance, fun-fur works better than NFT fur).

9.3 - Flocking
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Flocking: this technique is the same process that puts the fuzz on those little plastic keychain animals: you attach an electrode to whatever you're planning to stick the fur to, coat the piece in some kind of adhesive (like pax, which is a prostaide/cabosil mixture), then take a flocking device (which can be ordered and runs somewhere in the area of $100-200) filled with fibers of the correct length and turn it on. Through the same process that makes your hair stand up when you've got a lot of static electricity running through you, the little fibers shoot out from a pepper-shaker like device and imbed themselves onto the surface of the piece.

Advantages: lots: fast, looks great, good movement for mechanicals, Like hair-punching but FAST!

Drawbacks:Messy (the hair goes EVERYWHERE, shooting like teeny missiles), limited control for the application (do small areas, and be sure you've painted the pattern on the piece beforehand!), huge amounts of unnecessary shock-therapy, messy (did I say this was messy?), expensive equipment needed to apply the material, bother of cutting up the fibers to the right length in the first place (another good use for dog-clippers).

From: Smash Greywolf
The process of electrostatic flocking is something I learned about from Lex, and we had some talk of it a while back on the list. It involves blowing little bits of fur through a flocking gun at your subject. The subject has one charge, the fur bits have another. When they hit the subject to be furred, it is covered with adhesive, and the bits of fur hit the subject (Like an animal head or something) one end first, and the fur sets into the adhesive. Then, before the adhesive sets you need to try to lay the fur over if you need it to lay in a specific direction.

This process works for small short bits of fur, and looks really good. Unfortunately, it's not too durable,and is only good to look at. It's ideal when you are working for film, or video, but not for repetative use, or stage production, because it deteriorates rapidly, and is VERY time/cost consuming to maintain.

It looks great though for things like short muzzle fur...

Lex used it for some animatronic wolves that he did. I saw them on video, and they looked fantastic!

The advantage to flocking in animatronics is that you don't have to deal with a backing layer of the fur, and it's resistance against your servo actions under the latex skin. It ends up looking VERY real.

From: Steve Axtell
Smash has basically explained the FLOCKING process below. I would add that the durability of the flocking is entirely dependant on the glue type used, the thickness of the glue base and the temperate conditions at the time of the flocking.

The result should be strong and stable and never loose of flakey. Once done properly it should be able to be rubbed and not be falling out. Only after about 100-200 strong rubs should it show wear.

My ImagineLand puppets for example have only minimal wear after shooting 32 episodes, which takes about 8 hours of shooting for each episode. 8x32=256 actual hours on each puppet. The only places that show ANY wear would be the moving places around the mouth. That is fine for television work with a budget, but probably not for costumes that may get more physical abuse - expecially in the sports arenas.

The glue I use for flocking is water based and is called Mastobond. I get it in LA.

Another thing, the flocking fibers are actually pulled out of the wand container by the electromagnet forces. There is no fan in the hand unit. You can assist the action by shaking it. The hand unit can be purchased for around $800. It has a powersupply, wand with various sized containers with perf lids and a ground lead for connecting to the base your object is mounted to.

For camera closeups on animals where short fur is required and absolute or psuedo-realism is expected - Flocking is the way to go.

Okay - there IS a cheaper Battery only unit that costs approx- $400 . It's called the CP40 from Cellusuede Products (815) 964-7949. It takes 3 D cell batteries and has only once connection cable to give the subject a negative charge while the flocking wand has a positive charge.

I have scanned a photo of the ad and you can find it at

http://www.axtell.com/

Do a search for flock.

From Tephra Adularia
Van Dyke's Restorers' catalog has flocking guns and materials. There's a manual flocking gun for under $30 (they deal in people making things like jewelry boxes so the big guns that work with air compressors aren't exactly in demand). They also have long fiber rayon flock in forest green, royal blue, red, brown, balck, gold, silver-grey, and white available in 1/2 and 1 pound packages (one pound will cover 75-100 sq. ft). The flocking adhesive is available in the same colors as the flock plus clear in some undisclosed amount of ounces, pints and gallons.

9.4 - Hair-punching
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Punching: you can either buy a tool or make one from a long, fine needle by cutting through the eye of the needle to form a little fork. Either put a TINY bead of adhesive (like Dow-Corning's 355 adhesive) on the spot where the hair is to go, and use the needle to push a hair fiber into the foam (this is usually only used on either foam latex or a-b foam appliances or heads or suits). Depending on the use the hair'd piece is going to get, you may not even need the glue. NOTE: start from the BACK and WORK FORWARD. If this is for the transition from a fur material to skin (like around the nose or lips), attach the fur first, then work from the edge of that to the front (this makes sense if you think of hair-punching as the same as laying shingles on a roof).

Advantages: Looks great, good control of hair direction, good movement (for mechanicals). Drawback: Tedious work; you can't even watch TV and work on it at the same time!

9.5 - Shaving the fur
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From boogi
> A pet grooming kit should work pretty well, I had to use it for a
> costume I made awhile back in a few places. I can't think of too many
> better methods myself so long as you keep the plastic thing on the end
> to keep the length even.

Yep... There's the kits found in the pet shops like PetSmart or similar, costing maybe $20-30. I have one for when I was cutting down the fur for a zipper and velcro closure. The one I have has the main unit, oil, instructions, the plastic spacer things, and a videotape. You do need to clean it out every so often, like when you're done with the shaving down of the fur.

The videotape's got some good comedy value if you ask someone if they want to watch a movie and then show them if they say yes.

Camstone has a horse shaver that has a wide head that acts like a lawnmower. It cuts down the fur faster than a regular pet shaver. You should be able to find it in the tack shops.

From Camstone
boogi and I used a horse clipper/heavy duty pet trimmer on Monterey 4 inch pile fur that I used on my red fox body suit where the white chest fur and zipper attached. In that case, we used the clippers (and even a bic disposable shaver) to trim down the hair.

First, I made sure the blades were exceptionally sharp, because the pile of the fur (since it was sythetic) was so fine - that it made it harder to clip. Also, we had to do it without the usual blade lubricants, as that would have made the fur oily and stained later. So we made sure to only do a short patch at a time, and let the clippers cool - also cleaning out the fur that collected between the blades - so it didn't melt and gum them up as the clippers heated up. So by doing small sections at a time, and trying some test patterns first for "consistancy" of cut... and later trimming up any "shaggy" areas with either the clippers or a pair of fine scissors.... we had a pretty good result in the end.

I think one particular thing we found was that you had to have an adjustable clipper raised to a specific clipper height, and then clip to that height. Trying to clip to a shape was really hard (like fur already on a head) since the chance to "gouge" into the fur with a ultra fine set of trimming clippers was just too easy to occur without wanting it to. It took some real practice first to get it right... and I'm used to working with horses that are always moving.

But taking your time, trimming a little bit at a time, and practicing beforehand... seemed to make it work out in the end.