A while ago I got a CG v1 body with only half of one arm and without lower legs. The remaining joints were like new so I did not want to drop this body in my spares box.
I had just fitted the body with a new left arm when a fellow MWD member mentioned his intention to discard a figure because of a broken ankle, so I fitted the body with a cute FemBasix head, dressed her and took the picture on the right to try and show that one does not have to have two hands and two feet to be attractive.
As an experiment I wet-sanded the body with grade 2000 polishing paper, turning the glossy surface into a lovely silky skin-like texture.
Then I made a new left arm.
After that I fitted a cute FemBasix head and named her Claudia.
To enhance the expression on her face, I lined the edges of her lower eyelids with brown acrylic paint.
The next thing I did was completing her right arm by carefully opening up her upper arm, replacing the broken joint with a modified Armoury joint and fitting a lower arm.
I did a lot of measuring and test-fitting whilst making her arms and even more to work out what legs to fit her and so I grew ever more fond of this little cutie.
Sofar I still had to find her some lower legs that I can fit without having to perform major surgery on her upper legs.
In the meantime I kept Claudia propped up in my 'projects' box, as she could not stand and I didn't have a good place for her to sit either.
Then I got this idea to make her some custom boots that would allow her to stand unsupported.
I had not done any sewing in a long time, so this was a nice simple first project.
The slightly curved soles of the boots make that it takes some effort to put her in a balanced pose, but once she is in balance it is quite cool to see how well she stands, it worked out even better than I expected (she stands unsupported in every picture, no glue, no stand, no tricks).
When I made the boots, I did not have a proper right hand for her, all I had left were fists, flat karate hands and odd stuff like that, so to stick with the 'disabled' theme I made her a split metal hook.
The hook is functional, so she can hold (pinch) objects with it, making her actually more able than the other Cool Girls. The hook pops right in and out of the arm, just like a CG hand does.
In the meantime I got some more spare CG hands, so now she has two proper CG hands.
Now that I have her standing on my shelf for a couple of months, I've decided not to change Claudia any further (apart from finding her a pair of genuine CG hands). Fitting new lower legs requires major surgery to her upper legs and I still haven't come up with a way to do this without causing serious damage to her upper legs.
I'm particularly fond of Claudia because I had to do a lot of things for the first time on her: my first bit of face painting, first time I opened up and replaced body parts, first time I sanded a body, first time (in ages) that I did some sewing...
So she helped me gaining the experience (and confidence) I needed to do repairs and modifications on figures.
She's cute, she's beautiful and she can pose just as well as the other Girls so she deserves a place on my Cool Girls shelf rather than being tossed in a spares box like a broken toy.
Besides, what's wrong with being different anyway ?
I put some more pictures of Claudia on a separate page.
If you ask me, Claudia turned out to be the coolest of my Cool Girls !
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Initially I made a new arm out of sections of Plastruct tubing with a Yellow Submarine balljoint for the elbow joint.
I modified the balljoint to lock at 180 degrees to stop the elbow from overstretching. The pin on the balljoint on the side of the upper arm was made to rotate to create an axial hinge. The shoulder joint consists of a hole through the upper arm section into which a pin (thin section of tubing) was inserted, locked to the arm by a small pin that was inserted perpendicular to the upper arm.
The arm worked well, but is noticably slimmer than a CG v1 arm and building up the shape with putty or clay would add so much weight that the joints would no longer hold their pose, so I removed the arm again and adapted it some more (changed the shoulder joint to accept the larger fixed pin of an LM shoulder) to fit to an Armoury or generic LM-type body. The pictures show the arm as fitted to a spare LM body.
Claudias next left arm came from a spare Armoury body. The shoulder joint had to be modified to match the CG shoulder hinge. The elbow joint of this arm only bends through 90 degrees, so when I later got a spare generic LM body I replaced the Armoury arm with the LM arm, which has a double jointed elbow with a full range of motion. As with the Armoury arm, the LM shoulder joint had to be modified (adding a separate hinge pin) to fit the CG v1 shoulder disc.
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| Left arm made from Plastruct tubing with a Yellow Submarine balljoint for an elbow. The piece of string near the wrist is there to keep the hands wrist joint from flopping about, it is not used to keep the hand attached to the arm ! |
Here is a picture with a drawing, the pair of hooks I made and a CG v1 hand for comparison:
The righthand one (top) is viewed from the top, the lefthand one (center) is viewed from the (in)side.
I made the righthand one first, then checked the result with some Googled pics and noticed that the radius of the outside part of the hook is usually larger than that of the inside part.
For reference, the grid on the green cutting mat in the picture is 10mm based.
The outside part of the hook is fixed, the inside can be rotated open by pulling the 'thumb'. There is a small slot cut on the inside of the tip of the thumb to fit a small wire to operate the hook. However you need a figure with posable shoulders to be able to operate the wire, a BBI Perfect Body or a Ladies Mission body has this, the CG v1 body that Claudia is based on has fixed shoulders so I left the cable off.
The drawing shows a righthand hook part by part:
Two more parts are needed:
Here is how to construct the hook:
Start by finding a small screw of suitable size (old mechanical alarm clocks are a useful source).
Take the length of 1.5mm wire and pull a tight full circle loop in the wire, for a righthand hook the loop needs to be to the left and the part that will become the 'finger' should cross underneath the stem.
Adjust the loop so that the screw fits tightly but still moves free without binding.
Cut the wire to size, the stem should be about 18mm, leave the 'finger' part a little longer for now to make it easier to handle while bending.
Now pull a tight 3/4 circle loop in the remaining wire, for a righthand hook this loop should go to the right with the part that will become the 'finger' crossing over the part that will become the thumb.
Adjust this loop so that it will fit the screw tightly without slipping.
Fold the tip of the 'thumb' upwards using a pair of flat nosed pliers.
If you plan to fit a wire to the thumb, use a thin X-Acto saw blade suitable for metal to cut a small groove on the inside of the thumb.
Now determine the size of the radius of the hook, the ones I made are a bit small, especially considering that CG hands are slightly oversized.
The exact curves, shapes and sizes of prosthetic hooks tend to vary a lot as far as I can tell, so you can't go wrong.
Slip the scrap vinyl tube over the finger, use round nosed pliers to bend the finger, once the shape looks right, slip off the vinyl tube again, repeat for the other finger.
Assemble the hook by inserting the screw through the loop of the fixed part of the hook, then screw it into the loop in the movable part.
If the screw sticks out from the bottom of the assembly cut it off or sand it down.
If the movable part fits too loose around the screw you can use a drop of Epoxy Glue or Liquid Thread Lock to fix the screw.
Finally I used a metal file to create a flat surface on the insides of the tips of the fingers (indicated by the shaded part on the drawing).
Slip the rubber band over the fingers all the way to the hinge.
Slip the 20mm length of vinyl tubing over the stem and slip the washer over the tubing.
I rounded off the rear edge of the vinyl tubing just enough to get it to slip into the locking groove inside a CG arm, this will keep the hook from dropping out of the arm.
With some arms the locking groove is slightly wider, for those cases I made a small cut in the edge of vinyl tube and work some cotton thread into the cut.
I made the base of each boot out of a cork from a wine bottle, sliced in half.
I carved the top (inside) of each base to match the exact shape of her broken knees.
These bases already provided enough support to let her stand upright even before I added the boot sleeves.
The boot sleeves were made out of mock leather and were glued around the cork base with a tiny nail added to each corner to keep the edges from working loose.
I did the stitching along the edges of the sleeves by hand, part of the stitching is just for show but the pieces of velcro and one side of the flap are firmly stitched to the sleeves.
The boot sleeves wrap around her legs and close with velcro for a good snug fit. The velcro strips are both stitched and attached with textile glue to the sleeves.
