It's A Little Like Lego

… Or some other toy building set. Trying to build CJ’s new armature out of off-the-shelf ½” copper pipe pieces definitely reminded me of my lego days, crossed with the computer puzzle games my father is so fond of. Or maybe Tangrams… Here, match this shape, using only this set of pieces…

I started by building a similar shape to the shoulder rig on the 1st armature. The tape is to hold the main loop flat – you could get a surprising amount of twist from the pipe elbows.

CJ’s “neck” is pointing towards the bottom of the picture. This moves the arms back towards the spine (before they were too far forward, in-line with the neck).

This is where I really wish I had a laptop. See the method I hit upon to check the alignment of the new armature was to take a photo, run back into my bedroom where my computer was, take the pic into Photoshop and overlap the armature with the side view of CJ so that I could see how it lined up “inside” CJ.

Then I’d go back into my workshop, make any adjustments I’d think necessary, then lather, rinse, repeat. As you can see it took a bit of experimentation but little by little things came into alignment.

If you keep an eye on CJ’s knees you can see that I did experiment a little with heating and bending some pieces of plastic pipe in order to get something other than the 45 and 90 degree angles available to me with the commercial pipe fittings. In the end though I decided I could get close enough to what I needed with the commercial pieces – I’m intending that CJ’s arms and legs should bend at their joints anyways, so as long as the hips and shoulders were lined up properly it was all good in my view.

It was at this point that I had to leave CJ for a few days, on account of it being Christmas (with all the visiting, traveling, and merry-making that that normally entails).