Did your Furby’s original ears break? Did you make a custom skin and need the ears to be a different shape? Who knows! I’m just here to tell you how to take the old ones off. This will be a little shorter than my usual guides, since the process is quite simple.

To start, let’s take a quick look at how the covers vary depending on where and when your Furby was made.

On the left is a 1999 Furby baby with a red plastic cover. Even though there are three screws on the cover, only the bottom two will need to be removed. On the right is an adult 1998 Furby with a black plastic cover. This is a little hard to photograph clearly, so for the rest of this guide I’ll be using a GE Owl who has a red plastic cover.

You may also notice some variety in the ear bones themselves! Some bones have little pegs that ride in a slot on the ear cover. These keep the ears from overextending while your Furby is shucked, but aren’t really an essential part of the mechanism. Some Furbies have pegs and slots, some have just slots, and some have no slots or pegs. There’s nothing wrong with mixing and matching types if you're using donor parts, but peg ear bones won’t fit in a Furby without slots, so you’ll have to modify them.

To remove the ears, all you need to do is remove the two screws attaching the cover to the base behind Furby’s eyes (circled above)

You can also see that the bundle of wires connected to the light and IR sensors is covering the corner on this Furby. It should be relatively easy to push out of the way.

Removing the screws

Removing the cover. At this point the cam is loose and might become a little unwieldy. Be careful not to break any of the teeth on the gears.

The ear bones should come off with a little force once the cover is out of the way. Sometimes the gear will come off with them, but it shouldn’t be difficult to separate the two and stick the gear back where it goes.

You may notice that Furby’s original ears have a rubbery surface in contact with the gears that drive them, and that the ears can rotate without moving the gears. This is part of the slip mechanism that keeps the gears and motor safe if the ears get grabbed, jammed, or otherwise stuck!

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Or, “What does a correctly adjusted sync screw even look like?!”

When furbies do the wake-up dance (usually after putting new batteries in or pressing the reset button), they are searching for the “home” position. The motor runs in one direction, spinning the cam shaft until the nub on one of the gears pushes the sync screw contacts together. This makes sure that the furby is in the right starting position for all of the movements to be correct.

When the contacts are too far apart (the sync screw is too loose so they never touch) or dirty (something is blocking electricity between the contacts), the furby will keep spinning the motor until the batteries are removed, because it can’t find the home position.  When the contacts are too close (the sync screw is too tight so they’re always touching), the furby will stop the wake-up dance short, because it incorrectly thinks it’s in the home position.

I have some image references here, but it’s important to remember that the design of the sync screw area is WILDLY different between individual furbies, based on manufacturing date and factory. Your furby may look different, but they all work the same way.

This is what the furby should look like when it’s not in the home position. The nub on the cam is not touching the reader, and the contacts do not touch.

And this is what it should look like when the furby is in the home position. The home position reader slides up against the nub on the cam, which pushes the non-adjustable contact into the adjustable contact. This is what a correctly adjusted sync screw looks like. This doesn’t have to be terribly precise, and should be fine as long as the contacts touch.

If the sync screw is adjusted correctly and your furby still gets stuck in the wake-up dance, you may need to clean the contacts. Wiping the touching surfaces with rubbing alcohol on a q-tip or cotton pad should clear away debris.

Baby furby component comparisons. The one on the left with the yellow board is a series 2 “Primary” furb from the WT factory. It works, but is mute and the eyes were assembled wrong (just a cosmetic problem). The one on the right with the blue board is the series 1 “Peachy” JT furby I’ve been trying to get working.

Though a little difference is to be expected, because of different manufacturing dates and factories, you can see that the JT baby has a lot of hand-added parts (the blue capacitors in the front-left and the components in the middle-right next to the daughter boards). Both of these furbs are a very strange mix of through-hole and surface-mount parts.