This guys been working on animatronic tails for 5 years at least, I remember viewing his earlier models, they did look cool, but the problem is even though they look cool, they can’t be petted ;)

Fekkin’ furries.

Makes me wonder how many furries there are on hackaday. It’s sorta fitting, I suppose. They do tend to be creative, drawing and making their own costumes and whatnot.

“I remember seeing this years ago, but figured it was impractical for my porpoises.”

FTFY

Tbh this looks like the thing that crawled inside of Neo’s stomach in the first Matrix movie. It’s kind of creepy.

Screw that, I’ll just build one.

@Epsilon Squadron

Stop confusing hackaday with 4chan please

Another fekk’n furry here – I’ve met this gentleman and seen his stuff first hand (paw?). His earlier stuff was made out of paperclips, and it doesn’t seem to have changed. Now I’ve not made a tail before (I’ve made animatronic ears), but I’m not very impressed with the quality of his fabrication. What /was/ impressive were the experiments with EMG and muscle control – I’d like to see more of that work.

And another fur here. It’s nice to see this side of the fandom on the net for a change, there really are a bunch of very talented animatronics geeks out there. Someone from Germany for example built a suit head with servo-controlled ears that he controls with bending sensors in his left glove/paw. Here’s a (German) Wiki page with some nice illustrations: http://www.fursuit.de/cms/index.php/Animatronik

Another fur reporting in! Hackaday rules!

That’s a silly design. A furry, as usual, overengineering something to make it try and perfectly impersonate the design of nature’s solution, with all it’s flaws, and without the materials nature uses, ending up with something much worse. Heavy, fragile, requiring large noisy servos to run, with a loose unnatural look to it, and so needlessly complex as to cost a thousand dollars or more to buy!

You can make a better quality tail/tentacle spine with some silicone hose, and some parachute cord, which is durable, natural in appearance, ultra light weight, much easier to construct, and due to that substantially lighter weight, uses smaller, less noisy servos. The parts cost you all of fifteen bucks and (without any specialised tools) a few hours of your time.

Instructable forthcoming.

In response to muscle wire comments: That material works on the premise of heating metal through conductance, so unless you plan to keep your butt plugged in to a power socket, prepare to be disappointed with the extremely short battery life. If using a sensible structure, it doesn’t matter how close or far away from the ‘tail’ the servo is located, so you can really do anything you like to try and dampen the sound it’s gearset makes.

nother fur here :3
I’d make one myself, but, thaz kinda hard when yer in Bible college X3