Building a Ball Torso Joint
X-Men week continues with a method I developed for fixing Spider-Woman from Marvel Legends series 15, who is a perfect base for X-Men customs! X-women customs, more specifically.
Marvel Legends series 15 contained a new female figure, which was used as Wasp and Spider-Woman with minor variations. Taking the limbs out of the equation, the body is pretty great. The hips are ball joints that drop below the torso, allowing a good range of motion while looking pretty decent and not obscuring the Hinder Sculpt (HS). The torso is designed to allow the upper torso to slide back and forth over the lower torso, mimicking the conventional ab crunch with different mechanisms. The thing is, this torso mechanism doesn’t work. The parts are too tight, or have too short a range of motion, to achieve much of any effect. Instead you get a cut in the torso that doesn’t allow anything. Wasp can move by a few millimeters, but Spider-Woman is stuck.
I’ve seen examples of a fix for this on the Fwooshnet, and I’ll try to get a link to the article. These descriptions are a tad sparse, but I tried to carve out more room for the upper torso to slide back and forth. It led to a wobble, an uncontrolled joint, instead of an improved torso joint. So maybe I’m not really understanding what was done here. Please write in to the blog if you have any insight! Unable to get the existing joint to work, I tried to re-engineer the joint altogether.
Since I had no slide, I tried to replace it with a ball joint. First, I split my Spider-Woman in two, by giving it a good yank. Next I carved a place for my Kinex socket joint in the lower torso. I took out the back (back aesthetics are secondary to front aesthetics) and mounted the socket as close as I could to the front wall of the torso, and just below the top of the piece. I mentioned before how these Kinex pieces don’t respond well to super glue, but with some activator, this one held. If it hadn’t, I would have used some epoxy.
Next, I split the upper torso and removed the arms. I tried to save the original mounting of the torso coupling, as it had a metal piece at the core of the plastic, and would have been a perfect mount for the ball joint. No dice, though, the thing had come loose during the operation. Instead, I took a Kinex ball, dremeled off the extraneous plastic while leaving plenty of mass to mount it with, and secured it to the upper back piece with plumber’s epoxy. I played around with the mounting to make sure that upper torso was properly spaced from the lower torso. If the fit was too snug, then there wouldn’t be any slide at all, as the ball-and-socket doesn’t totally replicate the original slide mechanism.
Once the epoxy dried, I put Spider-Woman back together. Here’s some pictures of the assembled piece, showing the range of motion achieved at the mid-torso mark. Note that the dimensions of the figure have changed. The further apart the torsos are, the wider the range of motion; you want to find a good balance of range and aesthetics. Aesthetics is taken to mean proportions, not Giant Torso Gap as this picture shows.
To fix for this gap, I built a joint shield out of modeling compound. I used Green Stuff, which is basically a trade name, at least in Britain, because it’s flexible and wouldn’t shatter. But I made it thin enough that it’s never shown any signs of being under pressure. Maybe it wouldn’t work as well if the figure did more crouching and less back-arching. I’ve been using it on flying characters, who arch their back but don’t crouch forward… still, this could be remedied by mounting the socket at a forward angle.
I first tried out this fix making the 6-Month Gap Phoenix I showed a few weeks ago. I was happy with the result, but finding the right mounting for the parts was a pain. This time things went together without hassle. Tomorrow, I’ll take this body to a custom-specific WIP, as I make Jean Grey/Marvel Girl in her red X-Factor uniform.
Marvel Legends series 15 contained a new female figure, which was used as Wasp and Spider-Woman with minor variations. Taking the limbs out of the equation, the body is pretty great. The hips are ball joints that drop below the torso, allowing a good range of motion while looking pretty decent and not obscuring the Hinder Sculpt (HS). The torso is designed to allow the upper torso to slide back and forth over the lower torso, mimicking the conventional ab crunch with different mechanisms. The thing is, this torso mechanism doesn’t work. The parts are too tight, or have too short a range of motion, to achieve much of any effect. Instead you get a cut in the torso that doesn’t allow anything. Wasp can move by a few millimeters, but Spider-Woman is stuck.
I’ve seen examples of a fix for this on the Fwooshnet, and I’ll try to get a link to the article. These descriptions are a tad sparse, but I tried to carve out more room for the upper torso to slide back and forth. It led to a wobble, an uncontrolled joint, instead of an improved torso joint. So maybe I’m not really understanding what was done here. Please write in to the blog if you have any insight! Unable to get the existing joint to work, I tried to re-engineer the joint altogether.
Since I had no slide, I tried to replace it with a ball joint. First, I split my Spider-Woman in two, by giving it a good yank. Next I carved a place for my Kinex socket joint in the lower torso. I took out the back (back aesthetics are secondary to front aesthetics) and mounted the socket as close as I could to the front wall of the torso, and just below the top of the piece. I mentioned before how these Kinex pieces don’t respond well to super glue, but with some activator, this one held. If it hadn’t, I would have used some epoxy.
Next, I split the upper torso and removed the arms. I tried to save the original mounting of the torso coupling, as it had a metal piece at the core of the plastic, and would have been a perfect mount for the ball joint. No dice, though, the thing had come loose during the operation. Instead, I took a Kinex ball, dremeled off the extraneous plastic while leaving plenty of mass to mount it with, and secured it to the upper back piece with plumber’s epoxy. I played around with the mounting to make sure that upper torso was properly spaced from the lower torso. If the fit was too snug, then there wouldn’t be any slide at all, as the ball-and-socket doesn’t totally replicate the original slide mechanism.
Once the epoxy dried, I put Spider-Woman back together. Here’s some pictures of the assembled piece, showing the range of motion achieved at the mid-torso mark. Note that the dimensions of the figure have changed. The further apart the torsos are, the wider the range of motion; you want to find a good balance of range and aesthetics. Aesthetics is taken to mean proportions, not Giant Torso Gap as this picture shows.
To fix for this gap, I built a joint shield out of modeling compound. I used Green Stuff, which is basically a trade name, at least in Britain, because it’s flexible and wouldn’t shatter. But I made it thin enough that it’s never shown any signs of being under pressure. Maybe it wouldn’t work as well if the figure did more crouching and less back-arching. I’ve been using it on flying characters, who arch their back but don’t crouch forward… still, this could be remedied by mounting the socket at a forward angle.
I first tried out this fix making the 6-Month Gap Phoenix I showed a few weeks ago. I was happy with the result, but finding the right mounting for the parts was a pain. This time things went together without hassle. Tomorrow, I’ll take this body to a custom-specific WIP, as I make Jean Grey/Marvel Girl in her red X-Factor uniform.
posted by Brian at
8:16 PM
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