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And so it begins…

The other day I ended up watching “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and on the extras they had some information on the Mr. Hyde costume. One of the coolest parts (in my opinion) was the prosthetic huge hands Jason Flemyng had to wear. They had a special harness that allowed for each finger to be moved independently. I figured that it was something really cool and wondered how to make one. My motivation for doing so was that:

• It would make a great costume piece for Halloween or a LARP
• I needed something other than programming to occupy my mind
• It’s a freaking cool project.

We’re going digital, baby!

The way I figured, there were two parts that I needed to figure out: how to make a finger and how to make it open and close.  I’m hoping that once the fingers work, it’s just a matter of putting them all together to create a hand (no, I’m not forgetting about the thumb).  Anyway, I started off by looking closely at my own hand, more closely than I think I’ve ever have.  If we use the distal phalange (the bone of that is the tip of your finger) as a unit of measurement, the middle phalange is about 1.5x times larger and proximal phalange is about 2.5x larger.

With these measurement I armed myself with some card stock, scissors, toothpicks, rubber bands, and lots of tape.  I wanted to build a cheap and easy prototype of a finger before I committed to making it out of sturdier material.  The careful observer will notice that I didn’t really follow these measurements at all… sigh.

Giving you the finger

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s the finger prototype from the top:

From the side:

And here’s the finger curled due to my  pulling on the wire:

Pulling on the string curls up the finger quite nicely and when you let go, the rubber bands uncurl the finger.  Also, it seems the amount of wire that needs to be pulled is approximately the amount that gets pulled when I curl my finger — that’s good news as I was afraid that I needed to do something clever.

Next stop: Home Depot to get supplies!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Mechanical Hand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.