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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Thanks for taking the time to read my guide! If you’re feeling generous, you can donate to my Ko-fi! I really appreciate it, and donations will help me provide more guides and fun tech stuff in the future!

I was examining my buggy RL furbs last night, and found some interesting text! It’s printed on the EEPROM board (the chip that holds all of Furby’s programming is right under that black blob of epoxy), and looks like it says:

P/N: 415310-51 VER 1.0

8.27/98

That’s pretty clearly a part number, a version number (either for the printing on the board itself or the code on the chip), and a manufacturing date– August 27, 1998!