September | 2015 | Musings from the warp

Teddy Bear Fur Gaming Table ….

As mentioned several times in posts about our gaming we recently picked up the fur we’ve been looking for to upgrade our gaming table. Craig (my brother and partner in gaming madness) managed to scam some time off work and as I’m still been too sick to do any sort of modelling, came up to stay and under my direction trimmed and joined our fur, managing to create both a useful gaming faux grass matt and a large family sized throw rug.

First steps involved trimming the fur down, removing the artsie-white bleached ends and getting it down to more of a scale length. For the trimming we used a trusty Wahl Chrome Pro (TM) hair trimmer which I must say performed the task admirably. The fur was trimmed roughly in one direction then cross cut and scummbled in the opposite direction to remove both the residual white and any pattern shaved into the surface. A vacuum was used to pull the trimmings off the blade as it cut and frequent stops were made to oil, clean the blade and cool the motor down. We were so impressed with the cutters performance that we contacted Wahl with a glowing testimonial to use in their advertising in exchange for some gaming sponsorship funds but so far haven’t had a reply. Joking aside it has ground, self sharpening blades and a heavy duty motor, both features that I suspect kept it cutting over the 4 days of shaving and from bursting into bright and hot flame ….

There’s still some touching up of the join area required and I may yet still cut some random sections down a little lower to add some more variety but basically we’re pretty happy with the result. Of note also during the project we pioneered a new system of extremely useful and versatile measurement, the Craig. We measured the length of the fur mat and indeed our cutting progress in “Craigs”, with approx 7m being equal to 3-3/4 Craigs. Imagine our quiet surprise when we realised that the “Craig” can be used to measure everything from the height of rooms to the length of the driveway – all very useful for planning future home improvement projects.

The “Craig” (pat pending) measurement system in action …