HANDS!

This is my first pass on some fully-articulated hands for a new armature. If I'm being entirely honest, I'll probably end up using wire, but this is just something that I've been wanting to do for a while, so here we are.

Aside from my (fairly) trusty drill press, I have to do most things by hand. I use mostly off the shelf metal and hardware, but if I had a blank check for fabrication experiments, I would likely special order some expensive low-profile screws.

These work pretty well, but I'm still planning a second draft (even though I might not use them anyway).

To improve the fingers, I'll nest the segments in each other rather than using the sandwich plates. It certainly works fine this way, but I'm worried that the slight play in the sandwiches will loosen the screws over time.

The 1/8" angle that connects the outer fingers to the hand is too thin, so each requires an extra spacer piece, which is fine, but the operation in those is slightly less smooth than the others. I wouldn't go so far as to call it "un-smooth," but I have particular standards.

The thumbs are the real issue at this point. Certainly usable for almost everything that I would need a thumb to do, but rather than capturing "most" of the function of a real thumb, I'd like to capture all of it. It's a difficult predicament at this scale, especially because I'm stuck with M2 screws at the moment, but I'm a firm believer that creativity is born of limitation. I'll come up with something, and you'll see what that something is. Maybe next week.

For now, I'm moving on to the rest of the armature. It's less fun, but it will go quickly.

Stay tuned.

(EDIT: I thought of something for the thumbs. It's going to be bizarre, but I hope it works.)