Doll Rescue #4 - GI Joe Restored after Dog Attack #2 - Prosthetic Hand and Leg

Hi Magicians!  

As promised, here is the second installation in the story of the dog-damaged GI Joes I bought a few months ago.  

TW: This post has some serious doll gore.  If you're squeamish, maybe skip this one!

Today's Joe fared somewhat worse than the last one.  Here he is:

He's taken damage in several places.  Most noticeably, his entire left leg was missing  below the knee.

His left hand was missing too:

His right hand has also been pretty badly chewed, with tooth marks and a missing thumb:

...and his left foot had some tooth marks as well:

The first step was to figure out that leg.  It was broken too high up for the joint to be salvageable, so I decided to replace the knee joint.  I used the same type of Lego piece that I used to repair Jen (remember her?):

I measured where to cut off a slice of the thigh so the length of the Lego piece would land the knee at the right spot, and I used a mini hacksaw to do the job.  (Hope you're not squeamish!)

(The hard plastic core in most action figure limbs means that you really do need a hacksaw to do stuff like this.)

I had used a Dremel to reduce the size of that big block on the end of the Lego piece.  This reduced the amount of leg I needed to cut off.  Then I hollowed out the sliced-off piece of thigh so I could fit the end of the Lego piece inside:

I used hot-glue to stick everything back together:

I also used an X-Acto knife and a sanding block to make the transition a little smoother.

I constructed his new prosthetic leg from piece of dried-out pens, another Lego joint, and some wire:

The shank is two pieces of sawed-off pen with a metal rod core.  I used floral wire to attach the end of the shank to that green Lego joint, which allows the foot to bend back (see the right).  The foot is made from two broken-off pen clips, which I bent, glued together, and sanded to look like a carbon fiber spring foot.

After I had the "guts" and articulation of the leg figured out, I tidied things up by surrounding the hot-glue and floral wire with a piece of recycled plastic packaging, covering the foot joint with a scrap piece of faux leather, and adding a spring from inside one of the pens to the shank to simulate a shock absorber:

I used a scrap of fake leather to create the socket, and used glossy black and silver enamels to paint the leg.

The left wrist joint likewise needed to be replaced.  I followed a similar process for measuring the cut distance:

This time, though, I added a third element to the Lego joint: this socket.

I wanted to preserve rotational motion in the wrist as well as flexion/extension, so I decided to sculpt a socket into the forearm so that the wrist piece could both spin and bend.  I marked where to cut the forearm so that (once the length of the socket was taken into account) the wrist joint would land at the correct position.

The Dremel came in handy again to trim the socket down to basically just the hole:

I sealed the end of the socket with a piece of plastic packaging (to keep glue from blocking it), then I hot-glued it onto the trimmed end of the forearm:

I used Apoxie Sculpt  to patch up the joint and incorporate the socket into the forearm:

I sanded and painted the resculpted portion:

I Dremeled down the other end of the Lego piece, and used some more Apoxie to start forming a hand around the plastic nub:

I sculpted in stages, letting it cure between so I could do more shaping with an X-Acto knife and sanding block: 

Because the wrist joint is so different from the other arm, and I wasn't going to be able to make it look natural, I decided to make this hand intentionally artificial looking.  So, this was my first-ever attempt to design a prosthetic hand for an action figure!

After a few more sculpting sessions, the hand really started to take shape:

After the final sanding, I planned out the paint job and used acrylics to give the hand some detail!

I also carved out the forearm a bit to create the ridge where the compression sock would meet the prosthetic socket:

I used acrylics to fix up the forearm and color the sock and socket:

And here's the completed hand!

The right hand was a lot less work.  I glued on a bit of wire for an armature:

Then, I resculpted the missing thumb and patched up the tooth marks:

I used white acrylic paint and some light sanding to smooth things out a bit more:

Then, I repainted it to match the arm:

Finally, the right foot got patched up in much the same way:

And he's complete!  (Like I did for Jen, I sewed some clothes for him too.)

I'm really happy with how all the repairs turned out!  You can hardly find the patches on the right side, and the left-side prosthetics are fully poseable.  Joe can even stand by himself again!

I haven't seen any tutorials for creating action figure prosthetics anywhere online, so if this helped you pull off a similar repair, I'd love to hear about it!

Thanks for reading!

As always, you can comment below this post or email me at modelhorsemagic@gmail.com.
And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel, Miniature_Magic, for unboxings, collection tours, DIY tutorials, and more.

Bye Magicians!

~Miniature_Magic