hand mods

This is, so far, an embarrassingly bad mod job. I'm not sure why I'm posting about it aside from the fact that I took pictures throughout the process and feel like it would be a waste to not use them.

If nothing else, this can be a cautionary tale about spontaneously deciding something needs mod work done and not thinking through how you're going to accomplish what you want to do.

This is all started because I have an old FDoll body that has super boring hands. (It also has single joints in all the limbs but that's a mod project for another time) Anyway, I found these old Buddydoll hands that came with a body I bought secondhand. The person had replaced the original hands with Luts Senior Delf hands but sent me the originals as well. These remained wrapped up in my 'head closet' (where all spare heads and doll parts reside).

Today I used the boiling water method to re-position the fingers a bit to give the hands a slightly less boring pose. And I was just going to leave it at that and put them on the body. But as you can see here, they have a very odd attaching system and it gives them almost no range of motion.

So I set about turning this into something like the usual attaching system for hands. I've done this mod before (with much more success) on a Glorydoll body's hands.

Drilled through hand.

Unfortunately, my dremel bit of choice for this sort of mod was destroyed in the process of trying to use it on wooden beads when I was making custom hands for Avelarion. Rather than mark the hands off like a smart person, I just went at it with a different bit and eyeballed it. Horrible, horrible mistake. They look awful. But rather than just scrap the project, I decided it was okay. I could salvage this. And I would just keep on going.

I had intended to leave some resin for an s-hook to latch onto (which is what I did last time I did this mod) but I had messed up so badly with my dremeling that I ended up just having to carve out the whole area. This meant I needed to find a way to put a metal rod of some sort through the hands for an s-hook to attach to.

I can't find my small hand drill, so I tried a couple different things like just holding a small drill bit, hammering a nail through, and using a normal screw. None of these things worked, but a screw with a hook on the end gave me enough gripping power to get it through there.

Hand with hole through the side.

And the last part for today was to use epoxy to fill in the gaps where the old attaching system was. Once that dries I will put wire or a small nail through the hand holes and most likely use some combination of super glue and epoxy to keep them in place.

Not the prettiest solution ever, but most of that will be covered by sleeves. Partly because that's how Alek and/or Layne will be dressed and partly because even if the character in question was a nudist, I would give them gauntlets or something to cover up the hideous monstrosity that is these wrist joints. XD

Now with metal things for s-hooks. These things are so gross looking (and I didn't mean for the hole to go so far up past the wrist joint. this is what I get for trying to drill with a one-speed dremel....) but hopefully they will function and I can keep the wrist area out of sight (and out of mind...)

If they still don't work, I'm cutting off the entire wrist ball and making them work the way Dollmore/Volks/etc. hands work and having the wrist ball as a separate part.

EDIT: The horror story has a happy ending:

 Where before the hand couldn't move back and forth at all, it now has a great range of motion! Statik was holding Aleksandr's arm when I strung the new hand on. I didn't bother to move him for the first photo, but then it looked like he was mimicking Alek's pose so I had him do it again for the second one. XD