DVC hooves

[coffeehousedog]

I recently ordered their Large foam cloven hooves for a commissioner and have a question. Although first let me say I have no problem with the quality of their product (their stuff is always amazing and as I have said before their customer service is equally so.) So

Comments

[matrices]

Add foam!
These hooves are DIY products, you have to put some thought into how you still want to design your foot shape. You can't just stick it on the front of a shoe and expect it to look like an ungulate. Look at google images of the client's species and build your shape based off that using foam to disguise their human foot/shoe, then add the hoof in the appropriate area.

Looking at the Client's target animal in an image search is very important even if you are making a cartoon piece or have been given a ref sheet. How else would you know what the original shape looks like?

[brewingtrouble]

I agree with adding foam to fill the inner space.

I'd also suggest getting Shoe Goo adhesive and attaching the hoof to the underlying foam and shoe with that. Unless DVC have changed what foam they've been using to make their hoofs in the last few years, I found that both hot glue and E6000 let go of the hoof such that it was flopping around on the shoe, despite thoroughly cleaning both surfaces with solvents and letting them dry well before applying the adhesive. A very generous application of Shoe Goo seems to have fixed the problem. It just seems to handle the stress of constant flexion better, possibly because it was designed for use on shoes.

[matrices]

For what its worth, shoe goo and e6000 are manufactured by the same company, they are the same stuff e6000 is formulated to be thinner, Shoe goo is formulated to be thicker. They are just marketed differently.

I think roughing up the surface is actually the solution to getting it to stick. A lot of cast foam items have a "skin" which needs to be roughed up so things will stick reasonably well.

When your original glue popped off I bet that roughed up the surface just enough to allow for the second round of adhesive to stick better to it.

[brewingtrouble]

I might normally agree, but I would've thought that would have held true for the e6000, since the shoe goo was actually the THIRD repair job on that hoof-foot. Also because the FIRST area that it popped off of was an area that had already been cut significantly (and roughly) into the foam texture - on the toe. I had to cut into the toe area of the hoof because my wearer has rather long feet for his body size, and in order to make the legs look right I needed to move the shoe as far forward into the hoof as possible. I used hot glue first and thought it popped off because hot glue might have been too stiff to handle the shoe flexing with each step. Removed the hot glue (which also involved tearing and cutting some of it away), re-solvented, re-dried, and then added the e6000, which also failed. The shoe goo was sheer desperation at that point, I didn't really expect it to WORK so I used almost half a tube on it.