We’re Halfway There (day 50)

I didn’t get a lot of time in tonight and I’m at one of those points in the project where I’m not super-sure how to proceed. But I was able to check the completed midriff joint now that the epoxy putty is cured, do a little refinement there, and start on a bit of work on the hip part.


Last time I reset the position of the peg holes in the midriff part to better align them, but I had to wait for the epoxy putty to cure before I could test it out. Fortunately it seems to have turned out quite well.

With that finally settled, I started to think about how to connect the hips to the midriff. I’ve considered a few different approaches to this over the years, generally the idea has been for the midriff part to sit in a “cup” that’s mounted to the hips, and then a double-joint would be used to allow the midriff to swing forward over the front of the waist cable for forward-leaning or kneeling poses. I spent a fair bit of time just puzzling over how to do that (I’m not sure my old plans are necessarily viable). One method would be to have the midriff swing forward from a pivot point at the front of the hip- the problem is that it has to be able to clear the waist cable, and the only workable location I can think of to make a pivot like that would be inside the front connection point for the waist cable. I could put a polycap joint in there, but I’m not confident that such a joint would be able to bear the weight of the whole upper body. (Still, it’s a possibility…) Another possibility that occurs to me is I could have the midriff swing upward from a point at the rear of the hips, and then bend forward with a second joint in the midriff itself. This might be the better solution but I’m still not sure if it’ll work as this kind of arrangement would cause the midriff to run into the rear skirt when the waist bends forward. I want to figure out my solution to this soon so I can start integrating the hip parts into the build.
For now I looked into building out the thruster detail on the hips, but along the way determined that the relative sizes of the two surfaces where the thrusters would be installed wasn’t quite right. It’s rare that I’ll change a design choice I made when I drew up the original plans for this project, but in this case I decided it was worth tweaking the part a bit.

Overall not a lot of progress today but that’s how it goes sometimes.