The hips don’t lie

Imperial Knight Conversion: Pt. 7 — Hips and legs.

Here we are again. Now that things were coming together on the body of the Imperial Knight, I went back to the legs to get the pose finalized.

First of all, I had to pop the hexagon nubs off the inner hips. I could almost alter the position without having to cut them, but ultimately I just needed to be able to fine tune it. This would reduce the stability, but I was feeling okay about it after cranking up the knees and legs to super-solid state.

After some dry-fitting, I settled on this pose. I got the bottom foot plates (but not the feet) glued in place, with all the pistons set with some glue as well. I added the banded armor on the right inner thigh bit, at a different angle to give it more forward momentum. I didn’t like how the banded armor on the left sat, though, so I know I’d have to mess with that.

I looked at the banding, and figured the rings could nest into each other a bit and collapse their shape, so I opted to basically cut away the outside ring and add just a bit of the interior peeking out on the inside of the joint. I had to bulk out the other three, though, to give it the right width.

Here are her legs, ready to be attached to the hips. I like to think of this as her sassy teenager pose, but keep in mind that leg will be up and standing on some wreckage.

Now that the legs were basically in place, I decided to work on magnetizing the waist itself. I lined it all up and drilled through both the inside cup and this little bulging cap all at once. Do not glue this in place until you’re done. There’s no need to and it would make this all much harder.

This might look ugly, but it works. There are three sets of magnets around the central hub thingy. I spaced them out irregularly, used a larger magnet on one side, and flipped the polarity on the two smaller magnets. I learned this last trick from my daughter’s Skylanders: Swap Force characters. It prevents you from putting it on backwards since the magnets only work one way. After I got them all in the right place and superglued, I added a bunch of Milliput around one of the holes that was a bit fragile. I also filled in the bottom cap with putty and then finally glued that in place.

And then just to test it, once the glue dried I flipped her over. Success!

There isn’t really a great reason to magnetize this, other than transportation. And magnets are like magic so they’re fun. I had seen some other blogs about people noticing the waist never really stayed in place unless you glue it, and I didn’t want to deal with that, either.