The Unattended Lessons (working title): SEVENTH ENTRY

I have struggled with locating and choosing the right wire to use for the hands. Steel florist wire, wrapped in cotton seems to be used, but it also seems strangely hard to find, and in my tests, thin twisted aluminium wire seemed to last the longest.

So, though I never reached a final decision, I had to assemble hands of some sort to complete the figure in sculpting, and I went with 0.56mm twisted aluminium.

Hands are a pickle, as they are very small and delicate, and tend to break very easily. Hence one must plan for the very likely eventuality of breakage. I don't recall if fingers ever broke during the making of Solo Duets, but the wrists most certainly did break. Therefore, this time I decided it was important to use steel ball joints in the wrists, rather than wire all the way through to the forearm.

For easily replaceable or mass produced hands, as always there are various possibilities, thought of and yet to be thought of.

With a copper plate soldered to the tiny rod of the hand, last March Tobias created the possibility for a copper "sandwich" mechanism tightened with a screw, whilst I tried just using polimorph, hoping for more ease and speed.

I didn't like the rigidity of the "sandwich" device, and it's bulkiness, and the polimorph did not reveal itself to be at all easy. For some reason I took a liking to the stuff, and tend to optimistically try it in virtually everything.

Last week I decided my figures looked ridiculous without hands, due to waiting for who knows what sort of heavenly sign to help with a decision about what wire to use, therefore I assembled some using araldite. The araldite didn't seem to hold the rod well enough, and, though it fell nicely onto the wire with the help of gravity, it also bulked up too much. It could have been sanded down afterwards, but this is very difficult to do without damaging the aluminium. I switched to milliput.