Don't use rubber for trunk fusion

It's been 3 months since I fused 5 ficuses into one, they grew well since then, so it's time to check what's really going on there. This is how it looked today, a lot of leaves:

It's quite hard to see through this mess, so I performed defoliation, leaving 1-2 leaves on tip of each branch. Defoliation is fine for these trees, in nature animals like giraffes do it all the time.

Now the branch structure is clearly visible. Several new branches have grown. I don't want the tree to be any taller or wider at the moment, and some branches are growing in wrong directions. I'm cutting some of them and wiring the others. This is after removing old wire and trimming:

For this project I used rubber bands from bicycle tube to see if they made less damage to trees while still facilitating fusion. Well, it looks like the fusion part is failing:

Stems are bound together no problem, but they are not fusing after 3 months. Compare it with how other ficuses bound with steel wire fused just after 6 weeks! Even correction to number of plants and maybe better genes doesn't explain the difference.

Actually, during my manipulations with the plant, one of rubber bands have snapped so I could see its impact on trees, which was clearly visible dent. So hope for low damage was in vain as well. I decided to replace rubber with steel wires.

Now a bit of wiring and ready to go back to the greenhouse!