Make Posable, Movable, Articulating Joints for your PVC Props

today we are going to be taking those static PVC prop frames and we're going to be converting them into articulating poseable PVC frames I'm going to show you a variety of different joint techniques and this is going to be luckily in time for your Halloween Haunt Spooktacular or heck maybe there's a client project that you just want to add that extra element of surprise we got a lot of types of joints but three main ones that you can kind of import into your own projects to make them move more realistically so unlike your PVC prop where you pick a position and you best like that position because it is not changing once you glue everything together you know or even if you bolt it to be able to take it apart it's just kind of there with something like this you're going to be able to change its position and some of these joints you're actually going to be able to motorize so the first type of hinge and if you master this joint and I already gave it away is the hinge with a hinge you can do arm movements like this and like this so already you can have something coming at coming at you you know or like this zombie grabbing you it controls legs so you can kick you can Bend knees so you can get a crouching position with legs and arms you can go from sitting to standing so hinges are probably the number one joint that's going to add a bunch of Versatility right off the bat but if you combo hinges with our other joint types wow now you're getting getting crazy settle down there settle down all right so let's start with the easiest hinge to make so all you need is a piece of one inch PVC or whatever diameter you typically build your props with so a lot of these hinges kind of revolve around the one inch PVC but adaptations can be made oh yes we are all about adaptations all right so hinge number one is what I call the Heat and pinch and to do this we are going to use a heat gun and basically heat the end of this until it's nice and soft and you're going to need a clamp and we're going to clamp the end together to kind of mush our PVC pipe now when heating PVC pipe the fumes are like nasty so be sure to work in a well ventilated environment if you can do this outside even better so I have a little fan here I'm going to be blowing this across my face and uh you know putting my my official goggles on here my eyeballs here and I am not going to see anything at all like I'll be heating over here like are we done guys are we done now this heat gun has a first setting in a second setting people go all the way go big or go home number two setting so here we go so how do you know if you've heated it enough well you can start testing it and I can see nothing's really happening here you know when I press it it's not really compressing so we need a lot more and you want to do the bottom two inches so you don't want to be like all up in here you'll see the ends begin to flare out just a little bit and also the outside coating will start to glisten oh yes glisten that's when you know you're getting close oh there we go you can see that it's it's getting squishy so we're almost there all right this is looking pretty good as I roll it on the table it's beginning it's feeling like really really soft so let's see if we can get a good pinch out of this I'm just going to move this over here very quickly get this guy here and kind of line it up as best I can and start to pinch now pinch as hard as you can like really get that pinch going there we go and I'm gonna shift this aside now you don't want to start moving this thing it is like super hot and you'll get like a bend a bended joint so just leave everything as is so all I'm gonna do here now is just kind of douse it and very gently see I'm rocking it's got a little bit of give but we can for the demo purposes we can move on I'm going to go ahead and unclamp this the other thing that I like to do such that these Corners don't interfere with the articulation is round them off and how much you round them off honestly is really up to you you may have to trial and error depending on how much articulation you want for your creature your zombie your werewolf foreign [Music] all right so we have our hinge so now I'm going to put a hole kind of in the middle of it and I'm gonna go perhaps and what do you hear maybe about half an inch half an inch in or maybe like something like between three quarters and a half inch this is not an exact science you know just kind of like instead of making it right in the middle I usually kind of err towards the outside because if you put it in the middle well then the corresponding one can kind of hit these bubbles right here like this pinch point I guess foreign now all you would have to do then is repeat the process and create another one and then bolt them together so you can see because I put them on the outside you get much better articulation versus putting a hole in the middle now it's like and and you might have worst case scenario you just gotta round this off a little bit more and you have room because of the hole will be here so you can do a ton of rounding and get it to articulate better it's a good idea to put washers in between these two joints that way they move a little more flexible because you see that there's texture here and texture here and so they can kind of get a little bit of locky locky on each other in the little little friction one and a half inch there should be good all right maybe a little Pokey out but that's okay that's a technical term all right now we're not going to bolt this super tight which is kind of like show you guys let's do maybe two and I'm gonna do maybe larger washers there's also locking washers it all really depends on if you want this thing to be mobile or really really lock it in place then I highly suggest swapping regular nuts for the nylon locking nuts thank you all right so with the two washers I usually find that's enough really good movement and really smooth movement you can put a washer here as well it really just you know in a locking nut is the preferred you know but for demonstration purposes you can see that if I leave the The Joint kind of loose this is something that you can potentially motorize with say a linear actuator you know so you can put the linear actuator as if a bicep right and just actuate your arm up and down and see how smoothly that moves so you saw It's relatively easy to come up with super low Tech but highly efficient and cheap very cheap yeah the cheapest it requires one bolt a nut and some washers all right so fast way to do that now that I have made this about an inch now you can take a piece of PVC coupling and I'm not going to put it all the way in but if I were to slide this all the way in the coupling would kind of hit very close to here and now you have a joint and say I were to do it on the other side and you can put now any length of limb that you want and in order to secure your limb you can use two screws or a through bolt and when you're done you can take the whole thing apart and reuse this joint for something else or in this particular case they are so easy to whip up you can just like whip up a ton and not be you know taking your projects apart it makes them sad but uh and let's start on our next hinge and I have like a fresh piece right here that we can experiment on so alas when I was walking the gardening section of the Home Improvement store I was in the chain link fence area and check out what I found this is called a chain link fence rail end okay yeah so here you put your pole for your chain link fence and this part connects to other parts of your chain link fence and so you know like kind of the the crazy bad lady I'm sitting here taking all this stuff around to different parts of the store and testing it out and I'm like oh wait wait a minute wait a minute because look a whole if we were to get another one well isn't that a hinge guys and it it's a little bit jiggly it's a little bit jiggly and you can epoxy this together and solve this or just use two screws so these are little half inch it just needs to pinch that PVC pipe nothing too crazy and since we're going to be sticking one on each side if you get screws that are too big they might Collide you know or you can kind of like yeah stagger them the objective here is I'm going to drill a hole on one side and a hole on the other two minimum you can go four if you want or the through bolt method and just stick a bolt right across that goes through your PVC and that works too [Music] all right this other end done all right so I can put this in here and we can mark up where we're going to attach it so here and here thank you all right on the other side foreign yeah I have made hinges where they're simple my very first ones were stupid over engineered I mean just unnecessary it's in pretty well if I ever want to undo it you know you can undo it but again in this case what I would do is measure down one inch from the cap the end of the cap right there and cut it because this would allow me to slip in my one inch coupling and be able to put any size limb in here that I want done finito you know so all you have to do just like the other one is whip up another one of those and luckily you can see I already have one pre-cut and most amazing you know so if I were to shove this all the way in this would most likely bump up or be very near that cap there and it'd be ready to receive any type of limb that I want so in order to get this to articulate it's kind of the same deal and you know but for this obviously these tiny little machine screws are are not going to work so also in your chain link fence section I found you know the specific screws that match up with them so you can see that they're kind of made so you don't really require a washer but you can use one it's it's good practice especially if your creature is going to be receiving abuse so and same thing with this one I like to put let's put some bigger washers let's start with maybe two washers so with two washers here it's seeming pretty good and same deal you can put a washer you can swap this for a locking nut if you really need to lock these in place and I'm not gonna go nuts with you I'm not going to go nuts see what I did there locking this up but you can see that just like with the other hinge joint that we use this is something that we can articulate as well you know so if you leave the hinge not as Loose as I'm leaving it but you know rather loose it's got a very smooth articulation now a third and final hinge now I wasn't going to include this hinge because it's the more expensive to create it takes more time but I'm gonna show you guys anyways this was the very first hinge system that I created and again you can put a coupling in here and then attach you know whatever is left but this is almost kind of like a foot and an ankle you know almost this is kind of like on the border of over engineered some of you are like oh the word or you're being kind that's like way over engineered so three bolts so bolts I wouldn't say they're expensive but they add up this this stuff like starts to add up for your project also the bar holding it together I usually prefer to work with aluminum bar stock versus steel or other varieties because they're still strong easy to drill into less expensive I like going with the 1 8 inch thickness right here versus the 1 16 thickness this kind of gives you a little bit more strength so the idea is that you put two bolts on one Limb and then one bolt on the other and it allows it to Pivot now do you need two brackets not necessarily you can probably get away with just one aluminum bar stock and then just you know squeezing the other side cup s with this is that the more you squeeze to trying to lock this in place it does deform your PVC does it matter it really depends on your design so what you can do is put in a big old dowel here and drill a hole in the middle of the dowel that this can pass through yeah a little bit more expensive involves more work you gotta cut the bar stock you got to line up all these holes and you can see because I don't have a drill press it's not a hundred like this this foot is decent this part this one you can see that the hole did not go through in a even manner you know and this is what you get and this causes a little bit of binding you know which is no problem if you are going to tighten it down and it's going to be in one position it becomes a problem if you're gonna try and motorize it so yeah this is a hinge type I haven't used in a long time but I just wanted to show you guys these things evolve so don't be afraid to come up with your own hinge type and if you don't like it use it at a spike that's what I did you know like a lot of times ninjas are like woohoo she didn't like me I'm not gonna get used nope now you're gonna get extra use because now it's out of spite because hinges alone are going to give your project a lot of flexibility a lot of realism and things but let's take it up a notch right so here's another Movement we got our hinges but the human body also has pivots so think of a skull for instance or an animal head not only can the head with a hinge look down and up by hinging but you can combo that with a pivot joint which now allows rotation from side to side you know and we have pivot joints in our body they provide limited movement like you see my head you can maybe do 180 you know we can't Exorcist you know unfortunately that'd be cool and freak people out and somewhat our elbows are include kind of a pivot joint too because you have Palms down and Palms up so if you have a hinge joint you know we want to be able to do this too so how do we kind of combine the hinge joint with being able to Pivot like this so the most common way to do it it is what's called a pin and Slot joint minimum of like a half inch from the bottom all right so what we're going to do is take the miter saw and just kiss it you know we're not going to cut all the way through we're just gonna kiss it now the more that you cut through the more rotation you want to get so this could be kind of like a trial and error thing and see how much rotation so I know that I don't want to cut any closer to here I want to put my cut somewhere you know on this side hi [Music] ready so here you see I tried to make two cuts as close together as possible now the objective is to make them like literally side by side so you do not get this like little middle piece but it is kind of tough to tell and you can see that one cut is longer than the other really tough to tell you can kind of keep going and refining but whatever the shorter cut is is where your bolt is going to stop Snap It Off now the advantage of using a miter saw is that the sides here where you're going to have contact are absolutely smooth all right so yes you can use a cut off wheel like this you know the tough part is cut off wheel this always tends to melt a little bit so you will have to take a file of some sort just to kind of smooth it out and even when I do this with the miter saw I do like to just kind of go in and make sure the ends are smooth and if you want you can take your file and file that little bit down right there so it matches the you know the wider cut up to you I'm Gonna Leave it so the idea now is to find a bolt that is a good width to be able to slide so you can just use a bolt that won't go all the way through which is the way we're going to do it the other idea is to drill kind of a bigger hole here where you can do a through bolt that way there's an anchor point back here the idea is to kind of stick this in now the less it's in there the more it's going to wobble you know so perhaps I will move it here and I'm going to drill just a hole right there where the barcode kind of ends I went all the way through on this guy you don't have to all right so you can see if you leave it pretty loose that's your you're turning there your pivot point if you want to lock it in place then you go full force with this if you and then that allows you to make it a little bit tougher to to turn but if you want a little more stability that's where making a big old hole in the back and using a through ball so that way on this side here it's got something to rest on there is still yet one super important joint of the human body probably well as you get older you kind of notice this one a lot more so you have your shoulders and you have your hips right because unlike hinges or rotating hips or ball joints is like almost I'm not going to say it's endless movement but you know it gives you that circular type of movement so stopping here you're already good to go you can make a lot of motorized movements a lot of poses with your PVC Armature but if you want to take it a step further this one is very difficult to motorize but perfect for making really cool positions that you then lock into place you can do like roundhouse kicks and stuff if you have a Chuck Norris you know PVC frame that you need to animate so in order to do this we need some kind of ball device and we need some kind of suck it golf anyone Caddyshack alright so inspired by Caddyshack let's see what we got here perhaps something like this can be our ball so we get most of this ball in this coupling right because that'll allow us to attach limbs to it this way and we'll find a way to attach limbs to it this way so we're going to have to drill into this and luckily it's kind of a hard rubber so it's super easy to drill into so in order to do this you can clamp the ball down with a clamp and hold it by the clamp handle and do it if you have a bench vise even easier so I'm going to bust mine out now mine does have a delinquency it is not bolted down because I cannot decide where on the workbench I want to put it because each of our streams is different and I always have to move it now in order for this not to do this we're going to do the oh so safe round piece of PVC you know because that totally steady if you have a drill press you just won we're gonna do this the uh you know eyeballing way and it's okay if you depress him a little bit or compress him just get a good grip for now you're gonna need at least a two and a half inch bolt I have three inches lying around so that's what we're gonna use all right so what we're going to do is attempt to drill perpendicularly straight down good luck those of you with a drill press no I love you guys love you guys all right here we go get your stance on nothing to see here all right now if you find like mine it's not super straight on it's okay don't worry about it it's really not going to affect things too badly now one of the things I'd like to do is in order to give this ball maximum Mobility is to countersink the hole so that way the nut the bolt head sinks down to the surface now if you have the proper tools for countersinking go ahead I'm going to show you how I do it if I'm in a hurry and I don't feel like getting it out or if you don't have one the idea is to take a even bigger drill bit and just drill a little bit just kiss it all right so you can can see that got that going so now let's drive this guy in and again minus a bit long all right so at this point if your screw head is still popped up and it's not like super flush don't worry about it we're going to get it to cooperate here in the next step now that we have this thing kind of drilled in and you know two and a half is probably a better way to go we are going to put in a nut or two and this is going to be like up to you it really depends on the size bolt that you're using if the nut is really thick much thicker than this you may only need one and why are we putting a nut here well it's to kind of help drive this a little bit further down but this will also give us a little bit of clearance in our hinge and you're gonna see this as we kind of progress further I'm going to use two only because this is rather than thin and before kind of getting this guy here it doesn't necessarily have to be a locking nut you know it can be but not necessarily and I got this here why don't we just just use this so you can see my pulp head is really sinking in now see you can almost like barely see it and maybe I can rip this piece off yep you don't want to come do it to the point where you're compressing the ball because it'll be difficult to turn it in the socket so I'm kind of at the point where I should probably stop messing with it right and that's when I mess with it a little bit more just a little bit more and then infinitely regret it this is somehow gonna fit in here and it's going to roll around in there and with our one inch coupling well that's easy we can attach a limb here how do we attach a limb here you know and that's where we put a one inch cap right and then we can attach a limb there and now we got two limbs all right so problem solved so what I'm going to do is drill a hole right in the middle of this limb right here or not the limb the cap and then we're going to get ready for some more heat gun action oh because we have these nuts and they're lying flush with each other I think we're going to have way better luck pinching this by the knots not very pleasant for our project but you know sacrifices must be made so we want to get this decently tight because this is going to be interesting you can see that this is not 100 straight you can see it's a little off but that's going to be okay the objective is to heat this coupling up and try it expand it enough such that it'll fit three quarters down this ball so what I'm going to do is cut and this is up to you you know pay attention where your stopper you know stop ring is right there and maybe we can use this you know maybe you want to make a a mark something like this now the general rule of thumb is basically the deeper your cut the more Loosey goosiness you're going to get in that joint so you don't want to go too crazy with this but you don't want to be too conservative either so if you're not sure for your test do something you know that doesn't quite go to the rain but you know maybe is quarter-ish of an inch you know from it you know something like this and in order to make this maybe safer I'll probably do this that way I can back my hand away although I'm not gonna lie this has been done before foreign [Music] now it will be a little bit hot you know but I just go for it all right so let me clean that up with maybe a file let's see if this file will go in laughs foreign [Music] so we have a slit that looks pretty good you know and you can experiment start with this this is also going to allow this end to expand more we're going to heat the coupling with this cup on the end right and then we are going to hammer it on here now this is entirely too long now I'm actually going to do it a different way when you start heating this thing this starts to kind of expand and your driver pipe I guess that you're using to hit will inch its way until it's touching your ball thus preventing the coupling from feeding into your ball so I'm actually gonna this is way too hot to hold with your bare hands so I'm gonna actually do it like this I'm gonna stick it on here right and then I'm going to remove this and start hammering away I'm going to try and do it with without the dummy pipe and for here you want to get at least the middle point and out because that Middle Point is going to have to flex as well and you'll start seeing it get shiny as a test you can try and bang it on your workbench you're not banging it but you know just kind of press it see if it's ready nope it's not now this is a thicker wall so you're gonna have to hit this a little bit longer [Applause] all right you can see it's beginning it's beginning to kind of like cover the ball so we're going to continue heating it and you're going to notice that it's going to shrink back it's got memory it shrinks back but not to worry oh yeah get mushy remember that your ball is rubber you know so it can melt you want to be real careful about heating it on the ball so here's a cold wet rag it kind of helps to cool things off quickly so the ball doesn't become overly affected you know so let's see how that looks and it does kind of look like we're at least three quarters over the Vault you'll see right here you can still see the stopper ring right here and that's important you don't want to go past the stopper ring because when you put in your your limb you know it's kind of nice to have you know to have that little stopper ring right there and of course in this case I don't really like using PVC glue because it's way too easy to get it on the ball and now you've just locked your joint you know so definitely here use a through bolt that would then hold your limb in place so here you want this to really cool off we're going to kind of move in an expedited fashion you know and and just kind of see what we got going on here it's already cool to the touch and you can see how much our you know our slit there that we made has already expanded you know it kind of helped us get this over here and we didn't deform this too much so we can actually get a PVC piece right up in there don't worry when you first have this it's imp look it's stuck it's impossible to move don't worry about that just yet it'll it'll move it just needs to cool off and then it'll separate from the ball so the other thing I like to do is to use oil now this is just air tool oil you can use whatever oil you want and when this cools a little bit if you start to just drip oil down the sides here this is going to loosen up your joint but you can see how much friction because it's grabbing onto the ball joint now after it cools and you get it moving it's too much you're like this this is too much I just can't you know it's too much lightly take your Dremel tool and just open the slit up a little bit more you know you can do that you know not too much because the more you open this slit the more it's going to start to get loosey-goosey so say you've over opened and you're like oh no it's it's a little more loose than I'd like it to be not to worry get a band clamp across like this and tighten it real tight and that's going to close up this joint so let's put together the rest of our little guy here you know so I'm just gonna do this and I'm not gonna go super tight on him yeah there we go and I just this guy's convenient I could get my deep socket because this is the three inch Bolt all right so get that guy kind of in there and you can see now how each end is ready to receive a one inch pipe and here's your ball joint so I'm gonna start to oil it up see if we can prematurely start to move it in about an hour it starts to move so nothing to fret if it's not moving and let's pour in the oils on the sides and this is what makes it even more difficult to move this because now all your hands are oiled up too see how he's starting to move now get that oil so yes you will find that you need to oil this more Beyond just this first one because this is rubber it's actually kind of porous so it sucks in that delicious oil just like bacon bacon oil and you'll find that you have to oil it again and oil it again and then eventually you have something that you can move pretty easily but you can see it's kind of Snappy so it allows you to position and because of the slit and see our our nut situation here allows it to go into this slit so you get a 90 degree turn right and you can so it can work like a hinge in essence but then you can pretty much just like move it all around once it settles down so I'm going to let this oil kind of seep in and he is going to match his other little buddy right here that I made earlier so you can see look how easy this is to move much easier so if yours appear stuck not to worry don't fret and you can see it's still got a little bit of snap to it so it's great for you know those poses and because of this you can see that to motorize this is a little bit tougher in order to motorize it you would probably have to cut this slit a little bit deeper so that way you get more Loosey goosiness in it so with these joint types you pretty much have the majority of creatures covered unless you're making some like really creepy alien that just like moves in a creepy way yeah so you're gonna have to figure out those joints on your own or if you have questions definitely post them in our community the link is below and of course materials and even more detailed how to's on how to build our joints on the blog the link to that is below as well I had a blast guys we are getting ready for our super haunted Spooktacular or cool client projects or projects for your portfolio that you can kind of demonstrate your animatronics prowess on that stuff so I'll catch you guys next time bye

Channel: Rachel De Barros

Views: 44,906

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Id: 9O-hE6wb6y0

Length: 36min 33sec (2193 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 04 2023