Converting Ladies Mission feet to fit Triad Alpha ankles

Triad developed a good looking ankle with an excellent range of motion for its Alpha and Eva bodies, unfortunately the Triad feet are quite a bit larger than regular CG or LM feet.
Since I fitted DIY ankle cups to some of my generic Ladies Mission bodies I had some leftover LM feet in my spares box.
LM feet are made of soft vinyl, look quite nice and have the same size as regular CG feet so I decided to modify some spare LM feet to accept Triad Alpha ankles.

There is a difference between the skin tone of the LM feet and the Caucasian Alpha ankles, however the difference is not as noticeable to the naked eye as it is on the pictures shown here.

Here's how to modify LM feet to accept Triad Alpha ankles.

Tools and materials needed:

• pair of LM feet to be converted
• pair of spare Triad Alpha ankles with ankle pegs
• Sharp X-Acto or similar hobby knife
• Pin vise
• Motor tool
• 2.0mm (0.08in) drill bit
• small (1.8mm/0.07in) ball shaped cutter head
• pencil

	First open up the halves of the LM ankle and take these off the foot. The halves of the ankles are often just snapped together, sometimes glue was used. The easiest way to separate the halves is to gently insert the cutting edge of a knife blade into the top of the seam (i.e. closest to the leg) on the rear. Save the parts of the ankles in your spares box as LM ankles are known to break when removing tight fitting boots from the feet.
	Cut the flange for the ankle joint off of the LM foot as shown in the picture. Make the cut through the front of the foot follow the contour of the Alpha ankle, make the cut join the top edge of the foot near the hole in the flange. The part of the cut behind the hole in the flange can be made along the edge of the flange. Clean up any rough or sharp edges. The diagram on the right shows a cross section of the foot at the location of the ankle peg.
	Use a pencil to mark the position for the peg, 7.0mm (0.276in) from the edge of the heel. Mount the 2.0mm drill bit in the pin vise, wrap a piece of masking tape around the bit at 4.0mm from the tip and drill a 4.0mm (0.157in) deep hole in the foot. Note that 2.0mm diameter is actually a bit tight for the Alpha ankle peg but this is to make sure the foot fits firmly and will hold any pose. For this same reason I use a pin vise instead of the motor tool to drill the hole: with a motor tool the hole often ends up slightly wider than the drill size. The flexible material of the foot tends to move away from the drill bit so the actual hole ends up smaller than the diameter of the drill bit, squeezing the sides of the foot firmly and drilling the hole repeatedly will make the hole larger.
	Use a motor tool fitted with a 1.8mm ball shaped cutter head to widen the inside of the hole. Create a mushroom shaped hole by twirling the cutter around inside the hole. Be sure to leave a 1.0mm (0.04in) deep ridge at the open end of the hole at 2.0mm diameter. Clean up any burrs.
	Carefully push the ankle peg into the newly drilled hole in the foot. That's all ! Apart from Triad Alpha and Eva bodies the ankle posts of Triad Alpha ankles will also fit CG v1.5 and late CG v2 bodies and all cloned CG bodies. Alpha ankles will not fit the original early CG v2 bodies that came with egg-like shaped cross section ankle cups as those have longer posts. Fitting Alpha ankles to these bodies will ruin the locking mechanism inside the legs. Alpha ankles do not fit ZC Eve and TTL L1.0/L2.0 bodies either.