A lot of people really hate the bulging shoulder balls on ML figures that have the lat joint. There’s no natural flow to them and they mess up an otherwise good body sculpt. Here’s a simple fix for them.
Props go to Zombihamma, who in his write up of his Batman custom, mentioned that he took out the entire shoulder assembly and drilled a bigger hole and put it back in. This shoulder fix is based off of that concept. We’ll use Daredevil as our guinea pig.
First find the hinge at the top of the shoulder that holds the lat joint. Make two cuts through it to remove a small section so the whole thing can be pulled out .
With that hinge removed, you can now pull out the lat joint while it’s still attached to the shoulder and arm. No need to remove the shoulder from the lat joint or the arm from the shoulder. Keep them all attached to one another.
Cut off the remaining part of the top hinge of that lat joint, and slice a little bit off the end, because you’re going to need the room as you push it back in later. Don’t slice too much off the end or you’ll end up cutting off the shoulder ball’s peg within.
Now comes the scary part. You’re going to Dremel the hole bigger as well as hollowing out the chest cavity, and you’re going to Dremel down the lat muscles too (not necessary on every figure with the lat joint, but it is needed with any using the Daredevil/Silver Surfer body). The idea here is to create enough room so you can put the lat/shoulder assembly back in deeper and lower.
This shows an early widening of the hole, which wasn’t enough. The second pic shows the inner structures destroyed and the hole made bigger. On DD/SS you’ll need to work on the bottom and back of the hole more than the top and front.
Go slowly and check every so often with a dry fit. This looks about right on this side. Notice that the lats have been Dremelled down.
Wash off all the dust from the figure. Now stick some Epoxy putty into the cavity and some on the ends of the lat assembly. I used a quick setting industrial epoxy putty here but you can use Apoxie Sculpt or Milliput or any strong putty. Push the lat assembly back in and adjust the position to your liking before the putty sets and cures.
Picture on the left shows the shoulders waiting for the putty within to cure, with excess putty that’s oozed out wiped off. Second picture shows some additional touch-up sculpting with Apoxie Sculpt to clean up the outline of the figure some. Some people forego this step. I find it’s helpful if you’ve drilled the hole too big and need to fill up surface gaps or make things flow better.
And here’s a “before” DD and an “after” DD all painted. Para Spidey based figures can have the same technique done, though he has a butterfly joint instead of the lat joint. And Iron Fist desperately needs it done too. This can be done even on the old ML female torso base of Elektra/Phoenix/Black Widow. These different body bases have slightly different requirements when it comes to the final touch-up sculpt, like Iron Fist needs some major touch up to bring the trap muscles out to the deltoids, while the females actually don’t need to have the shoulders repositioned and just minor touch-up sculpt done to bridge the gap between the shoulder ball and the body. The general steps are the same nevertheless.
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