Articulating New 52 Batgirl

Posted in Custom Workstation

Posting this here since the douchebags who run fwoosh banned me for the third time.

Wanted to practice adding articulation to figures and Batgirl drew the short straw.

Added:
-ML style ankles
-Ab-crunch/floating ab joint
-Thigh swivels

I don't really need the thigh swivel, but I also wanted to make the figure shorter, so it gained the swivel anyway by virtue of the modification.

Roughly lined up the crotch and shoulders of the Batgirl, the buff ML female, and New 52 Superwoman. The torsos line up well, the major effect on height being the leg lengths. As anyone with eyeballs can immediately tell, her legs are way too long. The sculptors made the torso too small (about 6-inch scale) and then made spidery legs to compensate.

WTF mate? As usual, I'm glad I never pay retail for this stuff.



Here's how I made the swivel above the knee.



You know how anyone who collects LEGO has a million technic pins flying around? Apparently the pin goblins came and ate them all, I had to scavenge these two from some brick-built guns. All I did was cut the pin in half and fuse one end to the knee piece, then drill a hole in the thigh piece to pop it in. Harder than it looks, it was delicate work. I also shaved some material near the knee hinge so it can bend a full 90 degrees.

For the ankles I went straight to Revoltech joints since I had spares (no yellow unfortunately). Batgirl has hidden swivels at the boot-tops, but one is stuck and the other is super loose. I can ignore them now and only use the ankle joints.

If you do this, know that you can leave extra material on the sides of the ankle on the shin piece. You can see in the walking picture how the revoltech joint is half covered but it doesn't lose any range.

Overall, I reduced her gangliness by 1/4 inch, by removing material at the new knee swivel and ankles.









Decided to go with a floating ab joint because, as it turned out, they're not terribly hard to make.

Started by using a thin drill bit to cut the torso in half, being careful to keep the shape I wanted. It's made of the same plastic as arms and legs, so it gets flexible when warm.



The torso is partly hollow, so after some shaping I filled the bottom half with apoxie sculpt and further hollowed out the top half.



Here's how she looks with the new ab joint.







The joint is very simple, it's just a twisted piece of wire.



Some fine tuning:
•To make the hole in the lower body, I first drilled straight down. Then I widened it near the top into a funnel shape, this lets the wire pivot at a lower spot so the bending looks more natural (in theory anyway haha).

•Attach the wires however you want to the upper body. Here I made a loop and bent it 90 degrees, making sure the "stem" that goes into the lower half is centered. Then I made flat cavity in the upper torso, enough to glue the loop in there and have it be flush.

•The amount of wires twisted together determines how stiff the pivot will be. Here it's just two wires, and while it's enough for lighter figures, I suggest you go for at least 3 to 4, especially for figures with heavy loads on their upper torso (like capes).

•If I had another Technic pin I would slip it over the tip of the stem and anchor it with apoxie, then just pop it in like the knee joints. That way the ends won't unravel when you swivel the joint.