I saw a performance of spring Raccoon puppet last night and I wanted to know how it works and what the spring part looks like.  I can find Rocky Raccoon on Amazon, the animals seem to be marketed to Magicians.  When I search for how it works I get performance information rather than construction or how the mechanism works. I found an interesting discussion on a magicians forum where they wondered how they could get better constructed puppets and thought how our folks could have helped with that.  Does anyone know about these spring mechanisms?

Well, the name spring doesn't mean the mechanism, is more the description of the puppet, of course you can use one on yours, you can use a mattress spring if you want. I recommend that you play with a plush, see how it works for you, how it feels, after that you will know what you need to make it better.

You can try a stuffed animal, make yours using a tube of foam inside, you can use a spring, but has to be light, and covered with a soft cloth before the fur, or the last solution is to buy one and see it for yourself. It is always great to have one in the puppet collection, LOL.

The size should be aprox. 30 x 10 x 10 cm or I'be seen smaller ones with 24 x 7 x 7 cm.

I hope this help. 

"covered with a soft cloth before the fur"  Did you mean cover the wire with thin tube of fabric or a larger tube that enclosed the whole spring?  the magicians said the springs poked thru the fur after a while.

Yeah that was a thought, buy one and tear it apart.  I did not get a chance to examine it myself.  They are around $30 on Amazon. I wonder if a slinky will work similar?  The movements looked like the shoulder cable puppets somewhat except for the springing towards someone. The one I saw was very old and the fur had fallen off, it had no legs to start with.  It had a raccoon like tail but the face looked more rat than raccoon.  One of the Magicians said they had pulled off the tiny eyes and replaced with larger taxidermy raccoon eyes, but it still needed more of the black bandit fur around the eyes to look like a raccoon.  I found a great video of raccoon doll fur painting and coloring with markers in my searching.  Inside the Artdoll - Bornite the Peacock Ore Raccoon!

Sorry for the lack of words to describe something, my english is bad, LOL. And you are right "snail" is to enclose the whole spring to protect the puppet or make it durable because the heavy use, some times the people press to heavy and the fur tears apart, thanks in clearing that.

The Silnky doesn't work for this, you need a spring for pressing, not for pulling (I don't know the names of each kind in english).

Really nice video tutorial by the way! LOL