Take my hand; I’ll make it, I swear! (day 56)

Since I’ve made good headway with the torso I think it might be a good time to get back to the arm, try to get it to a point where it can be integrated into the overall build. First up, the hand:


This hand design is one that I worked on for my Blender model of the Zaku Kai, as part of an effort to make that model wholly 3D printable… Which means, of course, I could just 3D print the hand parts for the scratch-build model as well. But I don’t do that in part because I am stubbornly sticking to this as a full scratch build, and in part because building something like this myself is good practice.
The Zaku hand is pretty simple geometrically, the fingers are made of cylindrical-ish phalanges connected by spherical knuckles… and that’s pretty much it. I decided the best way to build the fingers would be to cut and shape lengths of styrene tube and attach them to a soft metal wire, then use epoxy putty to sculpt on details like the knuckle joints. Getting differently-posed versions of the hand can then be a process of recasting the hand and altering the cast copies to a new pose.
I started by drawing the shape of the hand onto styrene, cutting it out, and using that as a starting point to sculpt the palm. Then, using the 3D printed version as reference, I cut the styrene tubes to make a couple fingers and ran wire through them. There’s more work to be done of course, but it’s a start.