Miscellaneous part upgrades

I've finished up a set of long needed upgrades to address a joint problem: lack of a locking mechanism to retain the pin swivel joints in place. Long overdue, but I now have the tools and tech to pull it off. The main priorities were to upgrade the arms with this new tech, then the legs.

The mechanism is fairly simple, but annoying to build by hand in multiples. The principle is to use a locking ring clamp around a groove in a pin. The ring must have an opening to behave like a spring, so it widens as the pin passes through, but contracts after the groove reaches the position. The ring should then hold the pin in place but also allow for rotation. Much easier to do with plastic parts than Magic cards and paper clips.

The main components required are a cylindrical pin, a spherical shape at the top of the pin, a sleeve and a metal ring. The sleeve is comprised of two halves: the lower half that covers the pin, and the upper half that houses the sphere. Between the two halves, the metal locking ring rests, and will lock into the groove created by joining the sphere and pin. For the pins, I used the trusty cube to create 6.35mm diameter pins. The spheres were built using a tapered 90mm long strip of 110lb cardstock rolled around a 3.175mm (1/16") diameter bamboo stick.

In order to create uniform diameter sleeves, I had to build some tooling. Rolling up some paper around a bamboo stick, I now have roughly uniform rods to roll Magic cards around. These were built using a simple excel spreadsheet to calculate diameters in terms of paper lengths and thicknesses. I had some old ones from a few years back, but re-made some new ones to help do fit checks. Probably would be easier to use drill bits since metal doesn't deform as easily as paper, but that's how we roll.

I used Magic cards rolled around the 6.35mm (1/4") diameter rod to form a sleeve with the thickness of two cards. That thickness is the minimum I found needed to allow the rings to bend outwards and also remain stiff. A strip about 45mm long is enough for the inner housing. I used another 45mm long strip to connect the two halves with the ring in between to hold the assembly together.

 For the rings, I straightened out a paper clip and rolled it around a 5.7mm diameter rod with the help of beadmaker's pliers. There's a bit of fine tuning afterwards with the finished pins to get them to lock snugly.

The new locking mechanism allows me to do another upgrade: fixing the ankles. Right now, the ankles are just a hinge joint. I opted to upgrade the feet to provide two swivel joints and a hinge joint to allow for better poseability and stability. However, the foot requires a more delicate structure due to the small envelope. Therefore, I needed to downsize the scale of the locking pin mechanism.

In order to build more delicate portions, I had to downscale the pin joint from a 6.35mm (1/4") diameter pin to a 4.2mm diameter pin. The rings also had to get scaled down. The hinge joint pictured above ends up being 8mm wide and will support a 4.2mm dia lower pin and a 6.35mm dia upper pin.

 The hinge goes into two different sleeves to form an ankle joint for a foot. The smaller 4.2mm dia pin goes into a 4.2mm dia ID x 6.35mm dia OD sleeve with its own locking ring. The ID of the ring ended up being 4.1mm. The larger 6.35mm dia pin goes into the shin.

Here's the component breakdown of the leg. The pins were left unsanded, to allow the glossy coating of the card to help reduce friction. The sanded tubes are unsanded in the inside.

Adding depth to the pins so they aren't just sticks. Was easier to super glue blocks of card to the sides, then carving them until they were round. 

Fleshing out the calves with liberal use of 110lb cardstock. 

To finish the foot, I traced out a footprint, and marked the regions to trim off on the sole. The black Sharpied out regions get cut off to form a rounded block that I can then carve with a hobby knife. Perhaps the most difficult part of the job, as the foot needed to be smooth and not look like total ass.

After long hours of not doing anything productive, I whittled down the foot to shape to something remotely considered acceptable to a blind man. More liberal use of 110lb cardstock fleshed out the shape of the legs. After this, it was ready for a coat of "pale sickly girl" paint tone.

The new foot and ankle fixes some problems with articulation, allowing for better balance and stability. I can now reduce my reliance on obitsu stands, at least for barefoot poses.

I'm quite happy with the stiffness and strength of the new joints. I do have to upgrade two more dolls with this mechanism, assuming nothing goes bad with Hotaru's new ankles over time unexpectedly.

Loot Haul: C2E2

Haven't made much progress on the horse yet. Neck's a big issue. I did however get a chance to examine a wooden artist's reference model at this year's C2E2. Figured out what I needed to be able to replicate. Those wooden horses cost $99, which surprised me.

I did browse the stalls for some 1:6 scale loot to haul back with me. I didn't find a cache of guns like I did at Wizard World '07, but I did find something unexpected...

Why, it's a 2004 Donald Trump talking doll from The Apprentice! After about seven years, the battery works still. You can probably pick this up on purpose for under $5 at the right places, but I found this for $10. I didn't care much about picking him up for comedic purposes, but more for a $10 suit.

The Man
Donald Trump's a solid guy. He's actually designed with hard stops in his neck to prevent you from spinning his head 360°, Exorcist style. That was unexpected. His hands are massively rigid and can't do anything short of karate poses and breakdances.

He has no waist articulation due to the electronics, but that's fine. You won't be buying this for poseability. In fact, you won't be buying this at all because it's pretty useless outside of the suit. Last week, his joints were still stiff, but now, his left leg is loose and swings around by gravity. The doll has the same hip strength as the real one. Their party days are all over.

His feet are painted on, and the shoes are integral to his legs. Not bad shoes either. Just a shame I can't move them around. The paint comes off after a few poses, but in most cases, he'll have pants on to hide that problem. The shoes do scuff off the paint easily, so you'll end up with flesh colored  shoes after a while. Definitely not something that was meant to be played with roughly. Guess we'll leave the manhandling to Ivana. 

The Suit
I did find some issues with the suit, but that's to be expected for a $10 suit. I had a suit for $10 once and it was terrible, but acceptable considering the cost. You don't complain when you spent less than the cost of lunch on a suit.

 Wet Willy be dammed, your suit is coming off!

The suit itself was nice. Had a inner lining, which was surprising. I was expecting just the outer side being done neatly. However, the pockets are rubbish and non functional, which is acceptable. They were sewn on with less skill than the rest of the suit though, with loose threads coming out. Makes it look like Trump is on hard times in 1:1 scale and 1:6 scale.

The shirt was flawless for what it was. I had to separate the collar from the shirt, as it was sewn down to hold the tie in place. It did have cuffs that could be buttoned (or snapped together), which was a nice touch, considering most people won't be stripping Donald naked routinely (unless that's your thing).

The tie was very low quality. It's held in place by an elastic string. The string's conveniently short enough just to not fit around Donald's fat, solid, unyielding head that you need to cut off the string to liberate him from his clothes. I made the mistake of trying to untie the tie and now it needs some help to get back to operational status. It'll make a good modified clip on tie...perfect for a budget Trump.

The pants have no belt loops, but that's fine. They do have leg cuffs, and the legs also are WIDE. They were sewn with a generous allowance for even the fattest of Elvis impersonators. Actually, all his clothes are done with rather wide arm and leg openings. The pants do fit other figures fine without any problems. Just need to make sure nothing snags on the seams while you put them on.

Overall
Make no mistake, I did buy the Trump doll just for one person, and one person only. Perhaps the silliest $10 spent. Considering what I spent for Golgo 13's other suit, this is fairly acceptable.

As for what to do with a naked Donald Trump...

Golgo 13 Suits Up

Rather than sew a terrible suit, I went the easy route and bought a grey suit off toysity. Suit cost me $15 with $15 shipping, adding another $30 to the overall cost of Golgo 13. I'm starting to understand why the Hot Toys Golgo 13 cost $220+. The suit Hot Toys has is pretty obscenely detailed and well done compared to anything else out there.

 The suit set comes with a black shirt, red tie and some very forgiving and flexible shoes. I wanted to get a white suit/black shirt/white tie, but they didn't have plain white suits that looked good. Or white suits in general.

 The suit offers a good range of freedom, combined with the joints of the Dragon Neo 3 Body. However, it should be noted that either the body has rather beefy arms or the suit's really designed for our elbow-challenged non-combatant, Ken. The arms are a rather tight fit.

The pants have pockets and belt loops, which was nice. No belt though, but not complaining. The pants were a tight fit at the waist, with or without the shirt tucked in. May be a bit of a problem if I decide to give Golgo 13 underwear too. The shirt, coat and pants fasten with plastic clasps; no Velcro here. That makes for a clean look, but a very unforgiving fit. Unfortunately, I can't fully put his hand into the pants pocket for his casual pose.

 I can however, hide the fact that I can't by covering his hand with the suit.

 I finally bothered painting the case. Mechanically, I'm happy with it, but it's still large and not a discrete means of transporting an M16. I may try making another variant with the parts angled about for minimum volume and surface area.

 Overall, I'm happy with the suit, despite it not being lined on the inside. For $14, it's ok, but for $30, I'd at least want some extra slack on the waist and a belt. I could have gone the crazy route and bought a $60 suit from Saturday Toys, but I was going for cheap Golgo, not "same price for an inferior product". Right now, we're at $104 for "Golgo 13 for Under $130". The Saturday Toys suit would have made that goal a fail, at $134. And that's without a trench coat too.

 I'm also missing a .38 revolver. Duke Togo will have to make do with a .55+ caliber Ambassador! Not quite an easily concealed revolver, but it'll have to do. I'll have to build a proper revolver, knife and sheath/holster later.Until then, we can now make Duke Togo do completely un-canon acts for our own amusement.

 Hooray for the terrible idea of using my monitor as a backdrop! Duke is not impressed.

What if we had Golgo 13 snipe people with bunny ears?

Golgo 13 does not approve. I wonder if that could be imposed as a job requirement if you hire him.

 

Fortunately, where Hotaru fails, the mighty hand of J.Norad can force Golgo to do anything.

This Weekend's Project: Golgo 13 Headsculpt

This weekend, I attempted to make a Golgo 13 headsculpt for a Golgo 13 figure. There's already two professionally done ones on the market; one made by Syndicate and one made by Hot Toys. Both cost $200 or more to obtain. So, rather than spend $250-$300 to get one, I'm going to see if it's even possible to make one for under $130! ($13 didn't work, as I already exceeded that price on the body I chose.)

For the body, I defaulted to a Dragon Neo3 Body, since that's all the local store had. I wanted it now and not two weeks from now. That ran me $66. It also gave me a MG Lafette mount and an FG42 rifle.

I had a remaining unused pack of Sculpey III which I recall cost me $3. About 75% of that would be used to make a new head sculpt. Rather than give you the illusion that you can do this easily with progress photos, I'll just summarize the sculpting process. It would have slowed me down more than I'd like by taking progress photos every 20 minutes. The entire process already took me 3 hours.

I started off with a basic featureless head with the nose, face and eyes located. This is perhaps my 11th Sculpey based head, and certainly not my 13th overall, unfortunately, however fitting that would have been. From there, I used only an X-acto knife and a pair of tweezers to finish the sculpt. A proper sculptor would use actual tools, but when you're someone who builds shotguns out of cards, those look like decent tools. Worked for the first 10!

The progress went like this:

1. Etch the hairline and ear positions for reference
2. Flesh out the jawline, pad the eyebrows and hair (he has thick sideburns)
3. Carve reference points for the mouth and eyes
4. Rhinoplasty fever. I don't know why I did the nose first.
5. Shaping the face depressions and mouth
6. Fiddling with the mouth for an absurd amount of time
7. Eyes. 
8. Back to the nose and nostrils. Then more mouth work.
9. Redo eyes because they looked weird.
10. Ears and eyebrows.
11. Dropped head on floor and have to redo the nose.
12. Neck and rear hairline work
13. Thicken regions of the head to be rounder where needed
14. Wonder how terrible the head looks when painted
15. Picking Golgo's nose with a knife, and fiddling with his mouth more
16. Wonder more how bad this may turn out since it's starting to look like Steven Seagal and Spock mixed together

So, three hours passed and I baked the head for another hour, stopping midway while it was soft to smooth out the head where there was excess material. I safely could carve away without fear of crushing a delicate feature.

Some horrible painting skill later, I finished my very own Duke Togo. I feel his head looks a bit big, since he always has the appearance of a smaller head due to his wide build. Since I have the head finished and 9 bodies to swap him around....

Here's TEAM GOLGO 13! The least chatty group of mercenaries ever.

 

"..."

 

"..."

 

"..."

"..."

 "..."

 Now if I could get a model pack to swap out all the character faces with Duke Togo's for TF2, I might be bothered to play again.

This Weekend's Project: Annual Hip Surgery

This weekend, I tackled on a problem that's been plaguing the girls since their first iteration: deficient hip structures. The current build utilizes ball joints. I had some time to think of a new solution, assisted by the plethora of new construction methods I've learned from building the Team Fortress 2 doll set.

The hips have been a problem for one reason: they required to bear significant load on a small region of material. The hip requires a good deal of stiffness to resist torsion, bending/fractures, and friction to keep position under load. Prototype build 1 utilized screws and pins to hold the hip together using a hinge joint linked to the body by a pin. Really primitive, and the movements were restrictive and counter intuitive to the user.

Hip Iteration 2 played with ball joints. I had them aligned in two configurations (cup axial and perpendicular to the ball/shaft) and under three total designs. The problems with the ball joint were apparent: Friction was unreliable. To obtain the correct amount of friction, I had to balance the diameters of the ball with the socket ( often done by shimming with scrap paper) with the friction of the ball and the connector shaft.

Here's the current build. Note the paper used to shim the gap between the socket and ball.

The goal was to allow for maintenance by allowing the leg with the socket to be removed from the ball, and if needed, the ball could be removed from the shaft. This was critical back then due to the way the ball was constructed: poorly. I required a method of allowing maintenance in case the ball sheared apart or deformed significantly, or if I required a complete mechanism overhaul. Handy that I designed for interchangeability and easy modifications back then.

The ball's biggest problem was that despite being able to craft them with a relatively decent degree of accuracy diameter-wise, they were very difficult to make respectably spherical. It was more like building an octagonal cross sectioned polygon. When moved, the "sphere" had more friction in some positions than others.

The second problem was the nature of the material itself. Paper does compress to some degree, and the irregular sphere deformed a lot. It deformed from moving around the socket, with the thicker sections of the ball compressing the socket, making a depression with low friction. The whole setup was susceptible to expansion effects. I noted a fluctuation in friction over the year, attributed best to humidity. Naturally, water will expand paper. The socket was made of Magic: the Gathering (for the smooth finish to assist movement) and the ball was made of 110 lb cardstock. The dissimilar materials caused a more drastic change of dimension than if they were similar. I'm presuming the 110lb cardstock deformed the most, but I have not been certain.

As a result of the problems, I encountered another problem: shaft torsion. Friction was uneven from the ball/socket and ball/shaft interfaces. Some cases occurred where the friction was fairly strong and a degree of torque applied to the system did not transfer to overcoming static friction of the system and went to torquing the shaft. As a result, I had a fair degree of axial play that no amount of shimming could correct.

Now we have the major problems identified:

• ball irregularity
• friction irregularity
• shaft torsion

we can find a proper solution. For normal 1:6 scale figures, the answer is simple: hinge joints mounted to the hip by a rotational shaft/disc system. But I don't have the luxury of the strength of plastic, nor the design space to allow for that. Any part failures required some degree of destructive maintenance to access the failed part if I chose to go the traditional route. This is where Iteration 5 comes in.

Iteration 5 is similar to the traditional hip structure in that it uses a hinge joint and a rotating shaft connected to the hip in a "T" fashion. It however opts to put the rotation within the hinge than at the hip. Iteration 5 uses the strength of the screw hinge system to allow for easy adjustable friction and bypasses the ball-and-socket system and its resultant problems. Shaft torsion has been reduced by shortening the connector shaft. Less length, less torsional effects.


The system has the shaft inserted to a 6mm deep cup located on a notched region on the center movement disc. Disc is shown above the finished assembly. The hinge system resembles a "Pac-man", with an arc removed to allow for clearance of the cup. The cup moves along the arc, limited by the hard stops. Friction is easier to control, as there's only one factor for the rotational aspect. However, the engagement is less (10mm from the ball and socket, 6mm in this configuration) so the shaft needs to have extra friction to hold the same positions as the previous iteration did.

After some initial tests, I decided that my design was worth implementing, at least to one of the girls. Since I'm rather fond of Hotaru having legs, and Aelia isn't really doing anything important, I chose Lia as the test subject.

To construct the legs, I did the usual bit of tubes and shells. I however tried a new method of filling out the spherical void needed to cover the screw/nut part of the hinge: solid hemispheres.
These were made with the handy paper solids maker from long back. I built them in cylindrical steps and sanded them down aggressively with a Dremel. The tube and shell method will be glossed over here since it's fairly simple: glue tubes and reinforce with a sheet of Magic card.

So, how do the finished legs/hips look?

"Don't get any ideas, I'm technically only 2 years old."

Gratuitous upskirt photo time. The new joints solve a cosmetic problem of filling in a small unsightly gap between the thigh and the hip structure. I've left the port covers for the fasteners unsanded for easy access/maintenance.

"Hooray! I can... do the same things I could do already..."

As for evaluation: they are fairly stiff to allow the legs to retain their position. I'm going to see how humidity effects affect the system before retrofitting them to Hotaru and Aelia. Lia will be testing the system and finding any flaws over her next few months. The system does have drawbacks. The mechanism only works for fairly large sphere/hinge joints (mine was 18mm in diameter, and does not work for smaller diameters) and there's a good chance of the torque from moving the legs unrooting the shaft from the hip. I had to re-attach the shaft to the body after noticing the new hips had twisted the shaft out of place.

J.Norad Reviews Yamato Solid Snake (2002)

Today, I present the Solid Snake doll from Yamato's line of Metal Gear Solid Konami Doll Collection from 2002. No idea what the MSRP was back then, but I picked this up from a comic store in Kentucky for $70, new. I've seen Meryl sell for about $50, so I'd guess that the MSRP was around $30 to $40 in 2002.

EDIT: Seems like they retailed for $50-70 back then.

Snake isn't actually 12", but 11.5" tall. The Team Fortress 2 Soldier is a full 12", for comparison.

Snake's height makes doing some things a bit awkward. He's like the Michael J Fox or Sylvester Stallone of my figure collection: cool, but a very short guy once you meet him in person.

First thing you'll notice is the rubber sneaking suit. The chest guard is removable and held by six molded clasps. They don't connect too well. This is perhaps the part of the figure that forces it to be a limited display piece over anything. The rubber is fairly stiff and obtrusive that it limits Solid Snake's range of motion for his arms. You would think the shoulder pads would also contribute to the range limitations, but they're fairly cosmetic and do not inhibit movement as much as the rubber chest guard.

These are the extents of which he can move his arms with the suit on. His elbows are done properly, but he can't really put his hands together due to the restrictive suit stopping his shoulder movement. His shoulders however have ratcheting motion that let it stay in place. Great, since you'll need it to help keep the arms somewhat where you want them to be.

Solid Snake comes with a 1:6 scale HK MK23 with removable LAM and silencer. These can be stored individually in his side holster. However, they take a bit of effort to fit into his rather stiff hand. You can't slip them in, but need to position them in the right angle, then do a turn to fit them into his hand in order to minimize stressing his fingers.

The green regions in the image above show where the plastic will tend to start to whiten due to repeated fittings of any weapon into his hand. I would expect well worn dolls to show some whitening near the green lines. So far, they're slightly noticeable when you flex the fingers out to fit something. I'm not sure if this is common on other 1:6 scale figures, but it's a problem for me with this one.

Assuming you have some other 1:6 scale items handy, you can attempt to equip them on Snake. He won't like them, nor will he be able to properly hold them. He's unable to look down the sights of the XM-177 with his suit on. He can somewhat hold a ZACCA FIM-92 properly, if you happen to have one of those as well.

If you're buying this figure, the most you're going to do is either leave him in the box, which serves as a nice display piece in its own right, or put him in a very unexciting pose. He can't really do a whole lot with the suit on, but he looks great with all the details he has.

Overall, I found this figure to be pretty mediocre. Other issues I've had include joint stiffness. I wasn't going to try removing his cloth suit to check out his hip and knees. His left knee is a bit loose, along with his left hip. This makes him tend to lean to the left as his leg starts to sag down. Those were more of manufacturing quality problems.

However, his boots are stiff enough to allow him to stand without any assistance. There's little neck movement, and his bandanna needs a longer stub to help it stay in place. It'll fall off if you brush it gently on anything.

If you can pick this doll up for $70, it's not a bad display piece. I wouldn't consider taking it out of the box if you bought it for $150. It's too limited in what it can do to be thoroughly enjoyed without fear of wearing out something. You'd have to remove the chest guard to enjoy doing anything, but then Solid Snake looks less iconic without his MGS1 suit.

Well, anyways, you can still try to have fun with Snake if you decide to buy one. You'll just have to be creative in how you tackle problems.