Andrea is my first non-CG headed Girl.
A while ago I found a lovely head sculpt on eBay, it was advertised as 'fits CG' but it turned out that both the hole for the neck pin and the recess for the neck are too small (neck pin hole is 4.0mm, neck recess is 9.5mm diameter.
To fit a CG neck, the hole for the neck pin should be about 5.5mm, with the recess for the neck about 13mm diameter).
The head on the right in the picture is a CG head.
For some time I had a Dragon Neo Eve 'Anna' body (each of the 'Neo Eve' bodies comes with differently posed hands) in my spares box that I planned to fit with a double-jointed neck.
Dragon bodies come with a neck post with a swivel joint between the shoulders, whereas CG-like bodies come with a fixed neck with a joint at the top, so by retaining the Dragon neck joint and fitting a CG-like neck with a neck pin to the neck post, the neck becomes double jointed.
Trying to fit this head sculpt to the Dragon body looked like an interesting little challenge to me. In a lot of figure parts I once bought from a fellow MWD member, I found a Barbie body of which the neck was both the right size to fit this head sculpt and would fit over the Dragon neck post (with a bit of work).
I used this to adapt the neck to the head sculpt.
'Neo Eve' bodies have shorter legs and a taller body compared to CG bodies, CG jeans are just a bit too tall to fit a 'Neo Eve' body, so Andrea will be wearing skirts.
The skirt is from Warlords Keep, the boots originate from Capt. Burner (who wears her original MFP issue boots with her flight suit anyway), the legging is from FemBasix and the sweater I found on eBay.
When I put Andrea amongst the other Girls I was surprised to see how tall she is, with her slightly bigger head and slender body she appears to be smaller, but on her flat heeled boots she is almost as tall as a CG on high heels.
Her head is a bit more doll-like than the CG heads, but ever so cute.
Actually it turns out that the head is from a Mattel 'Puffy Yumi' doll (one of a pair of dolls modelled after Japanese singing duo 'Puffy Amy Yumi'), which explains why it fits best on a Barbie neck 
!
The head has a Barbie 'Tango' face and is marked 'TM & © Cartoon Network (s05)' on the nap of the neck with catalog number 'H9554' on the back of the head.
The catalog number on the head is the same as that for the doll, indicating that the head was designed especially for this doll.
The double jointed neck allows her to pose in ways the other Girls can not.
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| More pictures (click for larger version) |
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Parts for adapting the neck |
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Parts I made for adapting the Dragon neck, left to right:
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| I cut the Barbie neck off the body at 14mm below the top, this length offered the best balance between a not-too-long neck and leaving enough room inside the neck for both the Dragon neck post and the neck pin pivot. I used a cylindrical sander head on a motor tool to clean up the inside of the Barbie neck and to increase the inside diameter to 9.0mm, which makes it fit over the Dragon neck post. Using a small cutter head I also cleaned up the inside of the neck just below the top rim to make sure the retainer ring would fit. I had already reshaped the tip of the Barbie neck pin to fit the head when I found that with the 14mm long neck I needed to cut down the neck post to clear the large pivot ring from the Barbie neck pin. I always prefer to make reversible modifications to major parts, so I opted to use a FemBasix ankle peg for the neck pin instead, this only required cutting a recess in the top of the neck post. The ball on the ankle peg is too small to be held in place by the rim of the neck. Fortunately the ring on the Barbie neck pin has just the right diameter to be used as a retainer for the ankle peg ball inside the top of the neck, so I cut a slice of the ring using a razor saw. The long FemBasix ankle peg is a bit too long (whilst the short type ankle peg is too short to reach the rim inside the head) so I cut a spacer ring from 6mm diameter (TB-8) Plastruct tube. I drilled out the inside diameter of the spacer ring to 4mm and made a cut through one side to enable it to be fitted around the stem of the ankle peg. |
Modified Dragon neck post |
| Using a large ball-shaped cutter head on a motor tool I cut a bowl-shaped recess in the top of the Dragon neck post to create space for the ankle peg ball (the neck post will still accept a Dragon head sculpt). |
Assembling the neck:
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Painted Barbie neck with CG neck post fitted to Dragon neck joint |
"See, there's really nothing special about my neck".
