This is the third chapter in the story of the restoration of this vintage doll.
Having cleaned the doll and prepared the body for repairs, the next step was to replace the missing parts and repair the broken ones.
As you can see, her left hand was mising three fingers and her left foot had lost the big toe.
In addition, the top edge of one of the knee joints, and the one that we glued in the last chapter, had some rough edges.
I used Apoxie Sculpt, which is my favorite sculpting medium, to fill up the cracks and sculpt new fingers and toes. Apoxie Sculpt comes in two parts (like epoxy glue) and you have to mix equal portions of the two parts in order to activate it. It gives you up to 3 hours of working time before it gets dry, but I didn't need that much time.
As you can see, Apoxie is good for all sorts of things.
Her new fingers.
Honestly, I could have ignored the missing toe, but adding a new toe will allow me to fit her for shoes later on.
Next was the biggest repair: the missing hip joint. This ended up being the most troublesome step of the restoration process. It took a lot of brainstorming before I could figure out how to do it.
Here you can see how badly damaged the right hip socket was. Wear and tear had completely ripped out the hole and the compo and paint were badly crushed, cracked, and worn.
The first order of business was to resculpt the damaged socket with apoxie.
Next was the missing ball joint on the right leg. I got some wooden balls (used for heads when making wooden puppet dolls)...
...sawed one in half and sanded the two halves down...
...and used hot glue to affix the two wooden pieces on either side of the thigh section, with the string in between. These two pieces of wood would form the main structure for the new ball joint.
Here's what it looked like - you can see the imprints from the vise I used while sawing the wood.
Next, I used more Apoxie to fill in the space between the wood pieces on front and back, and extend the front to create an egg shape like the joint on the other leg.
<-- Front view
<-- Side view
<--Back view
However, as you can see, after all the base sculpting had been done, the ball joint was too large to fit into the repaired socket.
I used a Dremel rotary tool to grind down both the inside of the socket and the outside of the joint, shaping both so that they fit together better.
While I was at it, I also shaped the stringing slit so that the new hip would have a greater range of motion.
Here you can see how well the components of the new joint interface.
After the shaping was finished, I sanded the socket and joint to get rid of the rough texture left by the Dremel.
And here it is! The brand-new hip joint!
With all the body repair finished, the next step was to repaint the body.
Stay tuned for my next update!
