Making your very own furby puppet!

Well, I was about to throw out a furby, but it seemed like a bit of a waste of some good design.  So, I made a puppet!  Warning, this almost certainly void’s your warranty and may (will) cause others to doubt your sanity.

Step one: Follow the instructions at  http://www.phobe.com/furby/auto1.html to get the main skin off your furby.

Now you should have a creepy skeleton-style furby and a sockpuppet-style skin with a gaping hole where the face would be, and scrappy ears.

Step two: Reattach the other sides of the ears where the little bones used to go.  The best way is probably with a needle and thread.  (You could put in some more gadgetry here to let you waggle ears, but I decided not to.)

Step three:  Disassemble the skeleton-furby as far as possible till the face part can be removed.  I don’t have a clue how to do this, I just removed every screw I could see and eventually it fell apart.

Step four: Prepare the face for puppetry – I did this by using gobs of blue tac to hold certain bits of the eyes and mouth in place.  Feel free to improvise for a wider range of furby facial expressions.  I also added a largish gob of blue-tac to the mouth lever to weight it down, so the mouth closes when not held open.

Step five: Reattach the face to the puppet.  There are black tabs on the faceplate which slot into two holes in the fuzzy bit holding the whole lot together rather securely.

And there you have it, your very own fuzzy gremlin-like puppet.  Have fun, I’ll try to get some photos up sooner or (more likely) later.