When building a suit with an upright tail you will sooner or later encounter the problem, that the construction fails to support the weight of the tail. In the end the tail will move from the desired upright position to a horizontal or - even worse - downward position. I had this problem with my suit, too, and I'd like to show you, what I did to make things work again. My special thanks are going to Furvan, because he provided a lot of very useful ideas.
As you can see here the basic construction was mainly a leather belt with a leather
pad and two thick copper wires. Building the brace like this was sufficient, until
I stuffed the tail with plush wool for stuffed animals. Afterwards the constuction
wasn't able to hold the tail upright anymore. A new solution had to be found.
At first I stabilized the copper wires with two plastic plates and fixed them with
simple cable straps. At least this kept the wires from twisting against each other
and helped the stability a bit. But the problem of bending downwards persisted,
because most of the forces don't apply on those places but on the bendings at the
tail base. I pondered over this problem quite a while until Furvan came up with the
solution.
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Furvan suggested to take a length of thick brass wire, bend it to a square and glue
it to the burdened place. That's exactly what we did. Armed with two clamps and a wire
cutter we started working. The pictures above show the single steps. Below you can see
how we fixed the brass wire with hot glue to the bending at the tail base and increased
the stability of the construction.
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