Ball Joint Necks (and WIP: Shadowcat)

X-Men Month continues with an article on installing ball joint necks. Those X-Men, always moving their head around.

Marvel Legends has a great mechanism for neck posability that they’ve been consistent with since series 6 or so. The neck has a joint allowing the head to swing forwards and backwards, and turn on this post. But for customs using simpler necks with just a 360 degree rotation, I started installing ball joints to allow the figures to look up and down. (Or tilt their head sideways like a confused dog. Marvel Legends can’t do that, but it doesn’t come up too often.)

The ball joints themselves come from Kinex. I forget how I was first pointed towards Kinex pieces; it’s quite possible that the technique came from the old Raving Toy Maniac Customize e-mail list. Kinex sells its pieces on the Web by the piece, so one never has to get sets. I’m not aware of any other construction toy that does this, so bravo, Kinex; and too bad about coming up short compared to Lego in every other conceivable category.

Anyway, a few years ago I spent $20 and got about 100 of each of the pictured Kinex pieces. These prices reflect both the passage of time and some kind of crazy sale, but they’re still available on the cheap. I was still experimenting, but if I were to actually work through my stock and order again, I’d only get the middle set, with the two pieces of the ball joint. The other pieces just haven’t been useful. On the left is a snap-together swing joint, which I’ve tried to use for waists and bicep swivels a few times. It’s never worked, as the joint is really loose without working some superglue into the mix (and more on that later). On the right is a male-female pairing that represents the basic Kinex joint, in my understanding. It could be useful for, again, waists and biceps (the main joints that DC Direct figures are missing), but it’s such a bulky assembly that it’s hard to make happen. So again, the ball joints are very useful, and everything else, no so much.

But even the ball joints are a bit problematic, because the plastic isn’t really compatible with anything I’ve ever found in an action figure. It just doesn’t take superglue without a huge amount of surface contact. I’ve had some luck with a glue activator, but I usually either take care to completely surround the ball joint plastic with action figure plastic, or to use an epoxy putty as the binding agent. A more casual construction that would be fine for gluing action figure pieces together will just fall apart.

So, I’ve got a few customs with Kinex ball joint necks, like Monica Rambeau, Storm, Jean Grey, and some older ones that aren’t ready for this blog yet. For the purposes of my theme month, I want to use this technique to play with alternate heads for an Astonishing X-Men Shadowcat. This is a pretty good figure, although it’s more of a professional custom than a real figure. Toy Biz just recolored their Fantastic Four movie Invisible Woman, and it works! But the neck and face didn’t come out right. See, she looks kind of toadish. So I’m switching the heads.

First I boiled and popped the head off. This ended up breaking the joint assembly… I’ve had some really bad luck with this recently. With Marvel Legends female necks, heated for head removal, the back/forth neck joint is more likely to come loose than the actual head. I’ve started removing the hair, then holding the joint with pliers while I pull on the head. Anyway, next I took a Kinex ball assembly, and sawed off the assembly, leaving only the ball. I drilled a hole into the ball, so it would fit over the Shadowcat neck peg (maximizing surface area contact). On the figure, I trimmed off the head of the neck peg, spread glue activator over the stem, and fit the ball joint on it. Now I had a figure that’s ready to accept any head I’ve got.
So what’s going to go on? I had some ideas. I took some heads and dremeled them basically hollow, then put in some quick-setting plumbing epoxy. The epoxy held a trimmed down Kinex socket that I shoved in. Please note that the socket had to be really high in the head, probably in back of the eyes or nose. The Marvel Legends neck is meant to come up really high on a head, and when I stick a ball joint on top of that, it’s really easy to get a giraffe-neck. So the socket had to be really high.


My first attempt was a MAC Series 1 Willow. It’s an appropriate choice for a Whedon-written Shadowcat, but it doesn’t work for me, probably because Whedon’s Shadowcat is pissed off all the time, and certainly never smiles like this. Also the actress’s likeness isn’t obscured at all. Maybe repainting the eyes would do that, but maybe not…


Next I tried a DCSH Supergirl (I’m restricting my choices to sculpts with some element of youth in them). I think this would be a great choice for Kitty, but the scale is off. Little things, like the comparison of the head and the hands, gives this a bobble-head look. Weird, since the Superman and Batman from this series have pinheads.


Ooh, here’s a good choice! It comes from a Shadowcat figure. The whole ball-joint operation has given the figure more of a neck, and that makes a big difference.

I’m still not wild about the facial sculpt, but I’m out of ideas. Maybe something else will present itself in the future. Meh, it looks pretty good. You win this round, Toy Biz!

Tomorrow, X-Men week continues with a WIP of a figure that's already been produced professionally. It'll be Candy Stripe Tuesday here at the GF.