Well, my first post, so I better say 'hiya' first, although I've been creeping about for a while now.
I had to add a comment here as reading this post made me go out and try and make my first puppet from a replica.
I picked up a Gonze off the bay last week for £68 posted(the bay.uk), and within 3 hours of having him I had a pretty decent puppet, although it's not finished yet
Undressing him made me realise my sewing isn't upto scratch. The seams are faultless and you can't see the joins. The only way I I managed to undo the back, from but to the top of his head was to cut the thread inbetween the 'Muppets' logo on the back, then follow it along.
The main body is a piece of foam joined.glued down the middle. In the middle of this is like a spinal board with fixture points for all the wires. Getting this apart was easy, as was removing the wires from the arms and legs(again I bent them back and fourth until they broke) I was going to open the hands and feet, but again, I was petrifide that my sewing would let me down badly, so left them be. I refitted the plastic arm and leg tubes to give a bit of substance and to stop them just flopping about and not having any shape, but good enough to not give the impression that there's anything in there.
With the insides now out, you can pull the material up to half way above his head. I didn't go further as it meant you'd start to pull the material away from where it's glued around the mouth. From here you can remove the main wires from the head and his mouth. The wires here hold both his mouth and his neck/head in place. Lower mouth piece was easy, top was potchy as it's difficult to get access to the wore clamp, so it meant a fair bit of fiddling.
The foam around the mouth(upper mainly) needs to be re-shaped to get your hand in there as it's quite a tight fit. I find putting my thumb under the lower foam between the mouthpiece and the material works the mouth action better.
From here I hollowed out the body and glued it together. I wanted to make a full body puppet so I cut a fist size hole near his rear end and removed the neck support, so I was left with a sort of baked bean shape. As it stands the body is quite flimsy so it will need to be glued to the body material to keep it's shape a little better. I removed the neck area(like a bottle neck) as it'll allow better movement of the head and mouth. Plus it stopped my hands going through lol.
Anyway, that where it stands at the mo. I need to glue the body in, sew up the rear, add some control wires and alter the back of the clothes.
It's not a hard conversion, but you need to take your time to see how it all works, and more importantly how it goes back together. Now, where's my thimble and thread
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