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 (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 bits of soft PVC tubing took care of that.
Most of the bits 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.
Floyd and Destiny have a lot in common as both figures were assembled out of loose bits. Both were suffering from weak ankles but with arms around each other they stand stable.
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 rather unlikely candidate for the British Armed Forces.
With a grin like 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, the other a bomber pilot. The fighter pilot is dressed in a (rather baggy) flight suit and the bomber pilot in a (sharp) uniform with cap.
So I got a GI Joe Tuskegee Bomber pilot from 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 a 3mm peg to fit (very tightly !) in a 2.5mm hole.
The end result is that Floyd now stands sturdy on his own feet.
 "Hey, I saw you looking at that girl !" |
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