With the makeshift stand slipped under his belt, Floyd could lift a Cy Girl without breaking a sweat.
Actually, Floyd is not part of the Cool Girl series, but he certainly is a cool guy !
My quest for spare parts and other useful bits lead me to One Sixth Depot, an online shop specialising in
selling loose bits for 1/6 scale action figures. Apart from loose bits OSD often sells Grab Bags, packed
with a pound of all sorts of useful 1/6 scale stuff. So I included a Grab Bag with my order.
Among the stuff in the Grab Bag there were enough bits to assemble a complete male figure (a 'Super Soldier' figure made by 21st Century) and a head with a grin so cool that I knew I just had to
put him amongst the girls. The bag also included a set of hands with bendable fingers (made by Callous), these didn't fit straight to 21C arms, but a few pieces of soft PVC tubing took care of that.
Most of the parts I used for assembling Floyd were made by 21st Century, resulting in a tall and rather muscular guy but unfortunately one with weak ankles.
Within 5 minutes after assembly he was already lying flat on his face, so I made him a makeshift stand (bicycle spoke drilled into a piece of clear plexiglass).
With the spoke slipped under his belt the stand worked really well.
With the makeshift stand slipped under his belt, Floyd could lift a Cy Girl without breaking a sweat.
At first I used the stuff in the Grab Bag to dress Floyd up as a (european based) WW2 british soldier, however Floyd clearly has an Afro-American look, making him a somewhat unlikely candidate for the British Armed Forces.
With a grin as cool as his he would make a great WW2 pilot. Fortunately the then all-white US Army Air Corps had a training scheme for coloured countrymen in Tuskegee so I started looking for a suitable uniform.
Hasbro included a pair of Tuskegee Airmen in its GI Joe Classic Collection, one a fighter pilot (cat nr. 81393), the other a bomber pilot (cat nr. 81430). The fighter pilot is dressed in a (rather baggy) flight suit and the bomber pilot in a (sharp looking) uniform with cap.
So I got a GI Joe Tuskegee Bomber pilot off eBay and put Floyd in his uniform. Floyd is quite a bit taller than the GI Joe figure but the uniform fits well (in fact it fits Floyd better than it fits the GI Joe figure !).
All I needed to add was a pair of inserts for the shoes, as the rubber-like GI Joe shoes offered very little support.
Paul from Warlordskeep.net has a tutorial on his site describing how to replace sloppy ankles using Yellow Submarine ball joints.
I already had bought some of these ball joints before, so I ordered a spare pair of 21C feet (just in case...) from OSD and replaced the ankles of those with ball joints.
I push-fitted the upper half of the joint into the leg using a length of soft PVC tube as a plug, cut the ankle off each of the feet and drilled an undersized (2.5mm) hole in each foot.
The PVC material of the foot is sufficiently flexible to allow the 3mm peg of the ball joint to fit (very tightly !) in a 2.5mm hole.
The end result is that Floyd now stands sturdy on his own feet.
In the meantime I had assembled Destiny from a loose Destiny head and a CG v1.0 Blaze body. Just like Floyd she had rather weak ankles so I kept her propped up in my projects box.
Floyd and Destiny have a lot in common as both figures were assembled out of loose parts. Both were suffering from weak ankles but with arms around each other they stand stable.
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 "Hey, I saw you looking at that girl !" |
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