Advice on animationsupplies Armature Soldering

Advice on animationsupplies Armature Soldering

I must admit to not having huge amounts of experience with B&S armatures as my Undergraduate course in college only covered wire armatures. After graduating, I really wanted to expand my modelmaking skills and experiment with different types of armature construction.
I ordered a Standard Armature kit from animationsupplies.net, and was generally very happy with everything except the Threadlock. After about a week of animation, all of the joints (especially in the feet) started to come undone. This was enormously frustrating, and I eneded up unscrewing parts of my armature several times and trying to fix it with two-part 5 minute Epoxy. Sometimes this worked, and sometimes it didn't.
I managed to just pull through on my last film, but now I really want to try the ProPlus armature and I don't want to have the same problems. Some animators I know recommended soldering the joints (with silver solder?). I wrote to Andy Simmons (from animationsupplies.net), and he was very friendly and helpful, but said that soldering threaded rods was very difficult, and that the threadlock didn't work because of air bubbles. I did try to avoid this by applying it with a pin to all the threads. Could I have had air bubbles in every single joint? In any case, I just don't trust the threadlock to withstand the type of pressure I put on my joints, as my films demand a lot of active movement. If anyone has any thoughts or advice on this I would be enormously grateful!

Yorwick
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Re: Advice on animationsupplies Armature Soldering

Try Ball & Socket Armature Joints -- hope it helps you with soldering those joints.

jahnocli
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Re: Advice on animationsupplies Armature Soldering

Thank you very much for the link. It seems that the rods being used are brass, though. I wonder if this method would work as well with stainless steel?

Yorwick
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Re: Advice on animationsupplies Armature Soldering

There's only one way to find out!

jahnocli
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