It was a nice surprise when a tiny box from Taiwan arrived at my door this weekend, since I’d been feeling sick all day. The main attraction? Newly released mobility wrist parts, made by Cool Cat Collection. They’re not the first to make DD wrist parts with a wider range of motion- there are other third party manufacturers, but they aren’t as easy to buy from. And Volks has recently released their own parts, which of course are usually sold out and you’ll have to pay expensive shipping to the USA when they do have them in stock, since Volks USA is shut down for an expected 3 month website overhaul. Because Cool Cat had a buy 2 get one free deal on release, their wrist parts ended up cheaper than Volks and of course readily available.
I haven’t acquired the Volks improved wrist parts, but the construction of Cool Cat parts seems similar. The plastic matches really close to Volks DD NS and SWS. They’ve also made the frame for the hand part slightly smaller, which makes changing hands a bit easier. Personally I have lots more trouble changing MDD hands, and I’d happily buy some new wrist parts to avoid that hassle! But for now only DD is available. Cool Cat advises that the wrist post must be trimmed for use with the older DD 2 and DDy 2 style bodies. I ended up trimming mine even with a DD3, since it was difficult to fully insert the post into the arm frame. That still didn’t do the trick, though, so I carved and filed the end a bit until I was able to get the wrist parts fully in place. Next time I will skip the trimming and see if a bit of sanding is all that’s needed.
After trimming and sanding two wrist parts, I got Miki set up – and then promptly blanked on what poses I wanted to try with the upgraded parts. Still feeling sicky, I took a few meh photos before retreating back to bed. I’ll try to come up with something more creative in the future ^_^;
