Big Balls. That’s a problem.

Another round of parts. This time I upped the ball size to create more tension in the joint. That definitely worked, maybe a bit too well, so I’m going to bring the ball back down a bit. The one nice and unexpected side effect of the bigger ball is that as the grit wears out of the joint faster, but it still keeps a nice amount of tension. The ball becomes shiny and, I’m guessing, also wears the interior of the socket down

Let’s see. What’s new in the pics?  The arms have the new cruciform post design to minimize the material usage. Which seem to still be fairly robust. This nylon material from Shapeways is pretty nice. I haven’t had any breakage so far. Maybe I should try to break something just to get a feel for the amount of pressure it takes.

The other new thing is the the newly designed forearms. These are Xevoz-compatible (the future ‘ModiBotX’ body), but also have a smaller wall thickness on the wrist socket. The hands shown are from last round and still have the smaller ball (and shorter shaft design that didn’t work or look as well on the original forearms with the larger sockets. The tapered look is great and the wall thickness doesn’t seem to creating a breakage problem. Something to pay attention to over time.

The only other thing is the new ‘X’ cuts in the ball. These are intended to create some ‘give’ in the ball and seem to be doing their job. I’m somewhat wondering if this design will cause more wear in the joint. I’m prepared with a couple other options if this becomes a problem.

The posability seems pretty damn good. I’m getting a lot of travel out of the elbows. Much better than many of the ball joint figs on the market (it helps that he’s so skinny). I’m not quite sold on the current ankle design, but it mostly seems okay.

I guess the next phase is to start to assemble an entire kit. I’m going to push farther to reduce the material in the figure. Maybe cut some material out of the sockets with a pass-through and try the cruciform design on the other parts to see if they maintain their integrity. The cruciform is a bit ugly, but my goal is to get an entire figure down to $10 cost of material from Shapeways. I think I have a long way to go. The big shift will be to modify all the parts so I have a full Modibot Core body kit and a full ModiBotX body.