Sunday, September 23, 2012

Flocking your dekes

When Tim and I hunted with Paul earlier this year, we were introduced to his home rolled fully flocked mallard decoys. Now it's definitely a leap of faith to take to your decoys with adhesive and flocking and paint and god knows what else, because good decoys aint cheap.

Rather than seek advice, I just thought "yeah I'm into that" and set off at a million miles per hour. First, I found a couple of Avery full body hens from the batch that turned a lovely shade of pink/peach :)...

You need to catch loose flocking as it is applied - I used a small fish bin
Then I looked around for flocking, and found some locally sourced stuff that was coarser than normal flocking. Then I used a plastic based spray paint as adhesive; and shook the flocking on.


Flocking

Next you need to leave your flocking to dry for at least 24 hours. Very important. And don't do what I did - touch it and knock patches off... doh. Around about there I had a giant epiphany or "DOH!" when I spoke with Paul about how to get the colour mix and he told me he'd ordered flocking in the right base colours.

So I had to figure out some greylard colour schemes which I did, and air brush the dekes.

Took me a few weeks to get around to it.


Grey duck

Mallard hen




Just got to do some colouration work on the grey version, green beak and green-grey legs. From 20m they look pretty real and anything that close should be dead before it realises its mistake....


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