I got the bug to start working on customs again, but, as with the last time I got into customizing, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. All this great fodder, but with so many of my favorite characters getting made, I needed something to challenge me. I looked left and right for inspiration, and then cam across Figma’s Cobra figure. Sure, the seed was planted with recent S.H. Figurarts figures, but it was really Cobra that lit the fire under my ass. I started digging through my boxes for joints, finding loose polycaps that fit, digging out the Apoxie sculpt, and then I got to work.
The plan was to make similar figure to a six-inch Max Factory’s Figma or Bandai’s S.H. Figuarts that could be used, molded, and casted and used for future works. The joints used are Hobby Bases’s custom modelling good. Big Bad Toy Store (link here) and HobbySearch (link here) both sell them. These can be used in anything from your scratch figures to cutting up statues to customizing robots; there are no limits to what you can to with them. They even have articulated robot hands, which would work as custom parts in ThreeA Toys figures. I had a number of the round ball-joints lying around for other projects that never launched, and it was time to use them. These joints are similar in style to Kaiyado’s Revoltech figures. Hobby Base does make some similar to Figma’s.
I used the small joints for ankles, elbows, and wrists; they are perfectly sized for a six-inch figure. This was confirmed by studying Figma and S.H. Figuarts figures as they have the same sizes there. The medium sizes were used for knees, hips, and elbows. A large joint was used for the ab. I did have to make some modifications since I wanted to mimic the double ball-jointed shoulder and ab. This joint has a traditional ball-and-socket on one end, the hinged ball in the middle, and the stamen at the other end. Hobby Base’s joints have two stamens. I took one end and put a standard ball on it. The ball was drilled in the middle and the socket was engineered into the shoulder area. This allows that forward/backward motion of the shoulder, as well as the up-and-down movement. A ton of articulation and posing options. In order to replicate the ab-joint of a Figma figure, this same process was applied to the large joint. The rest of the joints are unaltered.
The hip joints required some engineering. I wanted to replicate the Master of the Universe Classics, Figma, and S.H. Figuarts way of putting the thigh swivel into a covering layer of the thigh, instead of engineering a ball on a hip. I did think of using Gentle Giant’s method used on WWE and Marvel Legends figures, but opted to go the Figma and S.H. Figuarts route. To accomplish this, I used a Hobby Base clear ball-and-socket joint (like the ones for the shoulder and ab-joint), and fabricated a crotch section with the balls and then a hip section. This is tricky as the crotch has to be narrow and strong at the same time; it’s more than likely I’ll end up casting this section to achieve the right stability. The balls then had to be fitted so they have as much of a 90 degree rotation out and could attach and swivel into the thigh. This required more engineering as I need a polycap into the thigh and plastic sprue that would fit the polycap. Once that was achieved, I had to attach it to the hip socket. Superglue and Apoxie sculpt were applied, and once dried, serious sanding occurred. The hips will need to be molded and casted to ensure stability.
I also like the neck joint on Cobra; it’s totally extravagant and unnecessary, but it will be fun to do. The neck consists of the a ball and socket joint at the base of the neck, and then another one of these hinged ball-and-socket joints at the chin. This took some eyeballing its engineering, but I think I have the result desired. Now the tough part: sculpting an actual body over this frame.
The rest of the joints are being assembled in an old fashioned, lazy way: rolling out Apoxie, sculpting them around a polycap, and then eyeballing the length. I’ll pull out my calipers before long and will start to get the actual lengths correct. Once that is done, I’ll get to the sculpting.
