Sunday 21 April 2013

When CycloneJoker Extreme Gold is just a repaint away ALSO fake skeleton bodieS!!!! :D

aahhh another weekend gone! Just like that!!! Had a lot of fun with kids and of course during downtime, with my SIC customs ;p

This time around I'll like to introduce another saving cost measure for any inteprid SIC customisers out there. How to use that useless split CJ bodies that comes with the set into a fake skeleton and turn your CycloneJoker Extreme Armor into Gold version. :D

Before we proceed, I'll like to point out one thing first: this is how much a CycloneJoker Extreme Gold limited figure costs:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/BANDAI-SIC-S-I-C-KAMEN-RIDER-W-DOUBLE-CYCLONE-JOKER-GOLD-XTREME-TOEI-LIMITED-/321059503125?pt=US_Action_Figures&hash=item4ac0a33c15
Thats in USD by the way.
Thats awesome price but you can make one urself pretty much easily with lesser costs :D

Also there is already a guy from Japan who made a tutorial on making fake skeletons but its all in Japanese :/ so i did my skeleton my way. http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/damien_sancho/61903344.html

First you need to buy something and that is its gold wings. Go here for a cheap fake version. Its as sturdy and as error free as the original wings:
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a210c.1.3.4.5eb8EX&id=16703176991
Its like only SGD10! But you still need to pay for shipping costs and you need an agent to help you buy it. Overall SGD25 will do to get those wings. In fact thats kinda high cost too due to the fact it was my virgin taobao purchase via an agent ;p There is a number of agents who can help you in this. For non Malaysians, you can try this site: http://chinabuyagency.com/

Now that you have the wings via a lazy way (you can actually custom them urself, just buy a few of those plastic sheets to make them but i feel making them by carving all those details out of the plastics compared to buying them off taobao, Ivalue my time more than SGD25 ;p)

All right, lets get down to business. Here is what you need to make the fake skeleton body:

1) The split static green and black bodies found in CJ sets
2) Double joints (see photo below, you can get these at http://www.hlj.com/) (you may not need this if you are prepared to sacrifice part of the stand that comes from CJ set to use it as a joint for the fake body)
3) A blade
4) Super glue
5) A handdrill
6) Good to have: epoxy putty, if you dont have this its still ok, putty was used to just make the fake skeleton tougher

Right, so the objective of the tutorial is to turn that split static half bodies into a similar W skeleton as shown next to the bodies on the photo above.

1) Use your blade and start cutting the split bodies up. Cut the bodies into a pelvic part, a chest part and a belt part you see the photo below. You will also notice i have placed some joints between the parts. Thats to indicate those are the areas you need the joints to be placed in later. I have cut out those silver mechanical looking parts from his chest and back which is useful to make other stuff. Now you are ready for the next step.


2) ok lets look at the belt part. Cut the top and bottom inner parts of the belt away. This is so that the belt do not imped your pelvic part and your lower abdomen part when you move it and gives it slightly more poseability for very slight ab crunch. Anyway if you dont cut them, your skeleton will become elongated and forced your pelvic and lower abdomen parts downwards and upwards respectively. Then glue them together. For added strength drill tiny holes on the gold surface and glue steel wires between them before glueing the gold surface together to make the glued parts stronger.
3) Now for the chest part. Cut your chest part into a shape that is similar to the real W skeleton. Sand the golden surface of the parts and glue them in so that the 2 sides chest parts become one. See photo below.

Now you will need to do some drillings to the front and back surface to allow the pegs from the transparent front and back armors to fit in. Before you start random drillings, use a color pen (preferably white or silve) and color on the peg surface of the transparent armor. Measure where the transparent armor will be attached to your fake chest part and poke the transparent armor near your chest part. The colored peg with the paint will then imprint a chop on the chest part on exactly where you need to drill.

Now for the drillings itself, for the front surface try to drill it with intention to drill a hole that is facing upwards. This is because the front transparent armor's pegs appear to be facing upwards. Not sure if this is a defect on my set or its for all set but thats how it is. If you dont drill slightly upwards, your front transparent armor wont attach all the way into your chest part. This will prevent the side chest green and black armors to be inserted all the way into the chest part as the transparent part will block them.

So finally you will drill 2 holes in your front and 2 in your back surface. This may take a couple of attempts to get it right. Eventually you will see that the transparent parts can be inserted nicely on your chst part like the photo below. Test it a few times with the side green and black chest armors to make sure the position is correct.

4) We're not done with hte chest part yet. You now need to drill a hole on the top surface of the chest part. Not a gigantic big hole or very deep one, just a half circle socket like hole will do.

Take the double joint I have shown you earlier above, cut out one of the ball joints, coz you dont need such a long joint. Then you cut the remaining ball joints a bit around the edge of the ball itself. This is because the ball joint will be too large for CJX's neck to go in. You wil notice on the photo below that the ball joint has been cut at the sides and the top of the ball. Kinda made it looked multi-hexagonal. Test it with the CJX neck a few times when you are cutting the ball to make sure you dont over cut. Now, glue the stick part of the joint on the small hole you drill on the chest part.

As an added measure (you dont need to do this if you dont have putty), you can stick epoxy putty all around the glued joint between the double joint and the chest part to make it stronger. You can do the same with the neck joint as well (again see photo below). I also used oyumaru resin to cast a mold to make those drivers for the side of his belt (see photo below for the 3rd time!).

5) Now we move on to hte pelvic part. The pelvic parts is made up of a lower part that connects to the leg and a upper part that is suppose to connect to the abdomen. Glue the split green and black halfs together. Drill a hole on the top surface to allow the double joint to be inserted in. glue the double joint in like the photo below:
Then cut the upper part up to a size where the CJX's abdomen armor can be fitted in. See photo below. Also cut the upper surface of the upper pelvic part into a round slope. This allows for a slight abdomen crunch. See pic below then.

From the pic above you will also notice I have drilled a hole on the bottom surface of the chest part to allow half the ball joint to be inserted in it. Glue the half ball joint on the hole of the chest part. You now have a full fake W skeleton to use :D

Slip all the CJX armor on to it and you will have a full fully poseable CJX.
There is still a problem and that is the inner shoulder armor is missing since the CJ set only provide you with 1 set that you use for your CJ. This is not a big problem as the gigantic CJX shoulder pads hide that part anyway. If you want to have some sort of inner shoulder armor anyway, get hold of a cheap vinyl kamen rider figure and cut off his shoulder parts. Slip the CJX arm into the shoulder part and connect it to the main CJX body. It works the same :)

So there you have it, a fake skeleton bodied CJX.

The rest is extremely simple. Just repaint the transparent armor parts with clear yellow paint and add on the wings. Total cost approximately SGD80 :D

I have an added problem as the loose CJX i bought, its transparent parts was already repainted in solid yellow paint. Took me 2.5 days to remove all the paint. I got lazy at some point sanding out the paint so i dip some of the transparent armor in thinner for half an hour. To my horror they turn into something like this!! The legs i used sandpaper to remove the paint. The others i dip them in thinner and the thinner eroded the plastics!! T_T
Luckily with a lot of sandings, the eroded parts got smoothen out and held some semi transparency.

NOW, if you are more adventarous, you can turn your CJX into CycloneAccel extreme too :D And thats what I did with another fake skeleton :D :

Paint a coat of silver first, then a metalic red over it and lastly a clear red coat over all. Gives you an extremely shiny blood red armor :D



Well thats it for today's tutorial!! :D Join me next time for another money saving tutorials!! ;D... maybe..

oh yea, if you find the tutorial above confusing, give me your comments on what you need clarifications on and i will respond to you in due course :D

Post production notes: Do NOT watch movies while making customs. Now my CJX Gold is taller than its suppose to be T_T

Thursday 18 April 2013

Dan's gotta a new body now :D

I found the replacement body using Hibiki's body base to fit in Garo's armored form to be so successful i tried Dan next. Only when i dived into the process i realised using Hibiki's body for Dan's armored form is a lot more harder than i thought it would be ;p Not that it takes a lot of time or skills but it takes incredibly high PRECISION!! Go through the tutorial and you will know what i mean :)

1) First thing to do is to cut up hibiki's upper butt coz Dan's a slim guy so to fit in Dan's slim butt armor you need to cut em

2) Drill holes at either side of hibiki's crotch piece to allow Dan's waist side armor to fit in.



3) Drill holes on Dan's back. Make sure to align the holes properly so that Dan's armor fit in properly This is VERY important as Dan's armor is very small and fits in snugly on hibiki's body.Any misjudgement may result in Dan's armor to not fit into hibiki body well.

4) More drillings!! this time at hibiki's front chest to allow Dan's front chest armor to be inserted. Again be very precise on the holes so that the front armor fits in nicely and connects nicely with the back armor.


5) Cut hibiki's shoulder ball joint holes biggger to allow alternate ball joint into the socket. The alternate ball joint is the same i used for Garo's custom (see my earlier post) :)


6) Oops forgot to take picture of the hole i drilled on hibiki's neck! I basically cut off hibiki's neck ball joint and drilled a hole there to let Dan's neck go in. This is again very important as Dan's chest armor has a hole that fits snugly between Dan's thick neck. Finally, voila! Dan's armored form in hibiki's body base. Again, I would like to note that ANY hibiki type bodies will fit on Dan's armored form. You just need Hibiki's chest part and lower torso part thats all.


7) close ups


8) Incredibly flexibility@!!!!! The end ;p

Wednesday 17 April 2013

Your S.I.C Hibiki's elbow and knee broke?!?!?... why thats great! XD

For those who have seen my earlier posts will know that this breakage can be repaired. For those who have been collecting SICs will know Hibiki is one of those lines which is most prone to breakage in the knee or elbow joints. Im not sure why BanDIE dont use higher quality plastics for the joints especially when Hibiki has one of the most linear, simple and nicest sculpts there is. Not to mention one of the best body base to be used for customs!

I mean seriously just look at the stuff you can do with it!


And here's some of my customs using hibiki type body bases

Anyway im getting side tracked.

The point is if you have a broken hibiki type figure, don't get upset or go and glue the joints fixed and tight (dont ever do that!!!!). In fact you should rejoice coz there really is a lot of stuff you can do with it :D And here i will tell you one of em :D

How to use Hibiki Bodies to house Garo armors. The reason for doing this is so you can free up Kouga's body and display him in human form coz really he's one of the coolest human form hero in the japanese tokusatsu/kamen rider world, none of the other rangers or riders can fight like him in human form (on screen) and he's got that "im so cool and not interested in pretty girls at all" vibe going for him. He cant act in drama though but thats not what we're here for anyway.

ANYWAY, back to the topic: How to use hibiki type bodies to house Garo Armors

You can use any hibiki type bodies be it zanki, ibuki, dannki etc etc. See tutotial below.

(1) Take a hibiki figure and remove his arms and legs and belt and head. The only parts you need is his body, his lower torso, his neck as well as the front part of his chest armor. The front part of the chest armor act as extra padding so that Garo's armor wont flop around on the slim hibiki body base.

(2) Get ready a pair of double jointed insert from this series, You can find these joints for sale at http://www.hlj.com/

(3) stuff putty onto hibiki shoulder joint hole. Then stuff the double insert onto the putty. Use a toothpick to pus the putty nearer to the insert to make it tighter when it dries. Alternatively you can perform step (4) below first before pushing in the putty.

Wait, whats putty you asked? why its this stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmMVM9NFxnQ&gl=SG&hl=en-GB

(4) Refit the front hibiki armor on and fit the garo armor over it. Then adjust the double joint insert to the angle that will fit the arm in well

(5) Let everything dry and color the double joint insert and the putty black. Insert back the arms on it and voile a new Garo without the need of Kouga's body!

(6)
It has greater flexibility on the arms and the abs compared to if you use kouga's body. And I think he is now a little taller and more hulkier too ;p

(7) his back :) nuff said
(8) Now you can display them both together :D

Until the next time!! Cheers!