(October 2002)

Upgrading Dragon Wrist Articulation

In the meantime, here is a method for improving the articulation on Dragon's gloved hands. The particular gloves used here are found on Dragon's US Rangers and SAS Chris figures, but the method can be applied to most gloved hands with little or no modifications.

(1) As you can see below, Dragon gloved hands are actually two parts: A hollow "glove" handpiece and the actual wrist mechanism.  The latter is itself split into a soft, cone-shaped inner half (the cone inserts into the hollow glove), and a hard plastic outer half with the arm stem. The basic principle behind this whole procedure is that we will rotate the glove around the cone.  That will allow the hand to simulate bending in any direction.  Since DML's regular flesh hands cannot be split apart like this, then this method will obviously not work for flesh hands.

To separate the glove from the wrist cone, you will need a pair of needlenose pliers. Shove the tip into the glove's hole and pry or pull the cone out. Make sure you are pulling at the soft cone inner half, and not the hard plastic outer half.  Otherwise, you may rip out the outer half with the soft cone still stuck inside the glove.

Warning: On some figures, especially the earlier releases, the soft cone may be glued into the glove.  This appears to be completely random. eg, The right glove may be glued, while the left one is not.  In this situation, you will have to cut the cone out of the hand.  Use the pliers to grasp the soft cone tightly and stretch as much of it out of the glove as possible (will take some force), then cut it with scissors.

(2) Now re-insert the cone into the glove, but rotated at a different orientation than before.  As you can see, depending on the orientation, you can simulate the wrist/hand bending in any direction you wish. The orientation pictured below will allow the wrist to swing vertically up & down.

Notice the glove now swings up/down in relation to hinge.

(3) When inserting the cone, do NOT insert all the way into the wrist as it was before. Rather, insert until about half of the diameter of the wrist pin is visible. This has 2 benefits:
      (1) The glove is deep enough that it will be held tightly, but it can still be easily removed later for re-orientation of the glove (ie, so that it can swing on a different angle).

      (2) A larger range of motion, as the hard edges of the glove can block movment if the wrist cone is inserted all of the way in. With certain glove designs, you may have to shorten or cut slits in the glove edges.

Insert until only half of the wrist pin is visible.

(4) All done! Go try out new poses!