Thomas Vaughan: Let's build Max's Armature! Part 2 (Feet and Hands)

Part 2 here we go!

Feet

We left off last time with the problem of the size of the feet. I knew they had to be smaller therefore I decided to scrap the front plate of the malvern armature foot and try and make my own to attempt to keep the ball joint.

My goal before starting major project was to have my puppets feet as ball joints, as I knew I would be able to get a lot more control out of them when animating, as I could control the tension just how I wanted it.

With that in mind, I started with a small cut from a steel sheet

The process I took can be seen above. I cut a rectangular shape out of steel and then filed and rounded the corners to get the right shape of the front foot, and more importantly to ensure that when animating no sharp steel edges would rip through the silicone feet.

I also made sure I used steel as this is magnetic and I could then have the option of securing my puppet down to the set with magnets.

But my main source of a securing the puppet to the set would be tie downs.

Above I'm checking the positioning of my M3 nut and K+S to see how they fit on to the steel plate.

Below you can now see how the new foot looks without everything being secured.

The new foot has now become a lot less bulkier and a lot shorter!

Now that I'm happy with how it looks I can start putting it all together!

To start I began by marking a spot where I could place the M3 nut. I then dented a small hole in the steel with a file and then drilled a hole through the steel to allow me to run a threaded bar through the steel and in to the nut for the tie down.

I also cut the ball joint rod to size, made small cuts and squared the tip off of the rod and then adhered the rod within the K+S with some Gorilla Epoxy.

Gorilla Epoxy was also used to adhere the nut to the steel.

Epoxing metal to metal isn't always a great solution, they don't really bond 100% together which is why it's always best to try and solder the two together if possible. However the equipment needed was not available to me, therefore to add a more securing bond to the nut and steel, I covered the top in milliput.

And the tie down worked perfectly!

Hands

To start I twisted 4 strands of 1mm aluminium wire to make up the arms and a twist of 1mm and 0.5mm aluminium wire together for the fingers.

The length of the fingers doesn't matter right now as it's best to cut them to size right at the end to ensure you have the correct size length for the fingers!

I then covered the looped end of the arms wire with milliput and then pushed the wired fingers in to the milliput. Once that was hardened I put some epoxy on the palm and then once cured I added more milliput to ensure the fingers were completely secure. The two images below are not of the same hands but they show the different stages with the epoxy in the middle. Multiple hands were made in case one broke while animating (As I'm now finished filming I can say luckily the wire did not snap, only slight tears in the silicone which was not visible on camera! )

The fingers where then cut to length, heat shrink wrap was placed over the wire to protect it and also little dots of epoxy was placed at the end of each finger to try and stop them from tearing through the silicone.

The image below shows the arms and hands finished. To the far right a finished arm can be seen but i decided that i could make the forearm smaller by using round K+S as appose to square K+S, just F.Y.I incase you were wondering :)

The last step to finish was sanding the milliput palms and back of the hand down slightly to get a smaller hand, and the final thing to do was put it all together!