From: Jinxtigr (Chris Johnson)
Subject: FL: CONST: Woohoo! SKUNK tail armature solved!

Just had to share it with _somebody_: I make tails, and I’ve been trying to work out how to make a springy foam/strapping tape armature for a skunk tail for weeks, as I’m going to MFM and feel compelled to introduce mephit tails there. Well, less than an hour ago I hit on the best trick for doing it- and it won’t harm me to let other people know it, even right away, as there’s so much sewing involved anyhow and I don’t normally keep ‘trade secrets’. Though this would be _so_ the ‘trade secret’, it really rocks. Here’s the deal…

Ingredients: 6 foot length of 1” thickwall pipe insulation (green or beige, not the black thinwall kind, that is too soft) fibreglass strapping tape

Take the pipe insulation and slit it in half with a knife- I like to cut down the existing slit and then put it on the edge of a desk to cut the other side, helps keep it even. You’ll have a C shaped cross section 6 feet long.

If you are making a belt loop, trim about 6-8” of the end so the C shape becomes a semicircle, shortening the ends of the C. Double this over and tape it for starters.

Loop the other end up for demonstration purposes- it will easily loop with the open part of the C shape on the inside, and you can hold the end of it to the belt loop area.

Below the belt loop, split the C shape into two sides. The round part of the C will be towards you when you wear it. Now if you loop up the end of the foam, it will form two side-by-side loops. You might want to shorten one of them by a half-inch or so. Here we’re coming to the key Neat Geometry Trick ;)

Swap the sides, so that the two loops cross over at the end- and tape ‘em under the belt loop. If one is shorter it should be on the inside. The effect should be a bit like a wire whisk with only two strands- the foam should form two nice easy loops without twists or anything. Note that you can flatten the loops into a horizontal plane, like a nice toony skunk tail. This is just like making two separate loops (top and bottom) to cantilever the tail, except for one very big point:

For each side of the horizontal loop, the top of the tail becomes the bottom on the other side- meaning that you only have to construct it and then start bending it into the desired form and taping it up :) should be possible to get very strong cantilevering, even with fibreglass tape reinforcement. I wish I could do ASCII art of this… basically you just hold the tail in the curve you want (or curved tighter than you want, preferably) and start taping the two sections together. There’s no adjusting the length of the individual sections because the posture will simply offset the center point of the loops. Pressure downwards from the weight of fur will bend the foam and exert a shearing force on the loops towards the end of the tail, and tape will easily stop the loops from sliding against each other.

*crickets chirping* um… is anyone following this? Maybe it’s just lateness of the hour, but I’m having a hard time putting it into words. It’s worth trying because the elegance of the solution was so cool- maybe I should consider demonstrating it at a con?

Anyhow- so that’s the design, I’ll be bringing some to MFM, if anyone wants to know more about how this is done just ask. The fur envelope will have to be rather interestingly tailored to fit properly but a wide black strip with notches cut in the top will probably work for the sides, and there’ll be specific shapes for top and bottom. I’m using Monterey Fox black and white for it. I hope this information was useful to somebody- it is basically all the design that goes into the new skunk tails, and I’m very excited about doing them now- I was extremely apprehensive that I wouldn’t be able to make anything as elegant as my regular tails, but this ought to do it.