Sockmonkey Sandrock WIP (2008-01-12)

New changes:

• Rejointed the arm
• Built up the front contour of the lower leg a bit with putty so the vents on the knee armor will have the right shape, once I add them
• Made the cockpit hatch and crotch part narrower

I had wanted to rejoint the kit’s elbow, mainly to improve the looks of the elbow joint. Rejointing the elbow is easy enough with parts like Wave T-Shaft, but since the new joint doesn’t swivel as well as bend I had to add the swiveling function back onto the arm. This time around I decided to do this by replacing the shoulder joint with a Yellow Submarine “Ball-shaped joint” – a 10mm spherical hinge. This also means the shoulder peg will have to be replaced with some kind of socket. The joint could just barely fit into the modified shoulder armor – I don’t know exactly how much range of motion the arm will have but I think it’ll be pretty good.

The arm work was mostly improvised. It was more experimentation than planning, and as a result I actually wrecked the right upper arm during the first attempt at this modification. Adding the joints wasn’t a problem, but as part of the process I decided to make the upper arm slimmer: that temporarily turned the upper arm into a very fragile assembly. The part was to be reinforced on the inside with epoxy putty, but when the putty cured I discovered that the part was crooked – so at that point I gave up on it and started over with the other arm. To resolve the issue I’m going to recast the modified left upper arm to replace the wrecked part.

The situation with the knee vents on the lower legs is a bit complicated. The kit doesn’t have the knee vents molded in (and there is absolutely no excuse for that! No draft angle issue or anything…) but additionally, the area where the vent is supposed to be should be rectangular, but because of the shape of the lower leg it’s actually not. The “calf” pods on the lower legs actually extend forward past the front edge of the shin. Rather than reducing the calf pods or separating the shin from the calf and reattaching them, I decided to just bulk up the shin a little, just enough to provide the knee armor a relatively flat surface to sit on. I was worried that adding that bulk to the front of the lower legs would make the shins appear too thick: I think that’s still a possibility but so far it seems OK.