How to move shrugging shoulders with ease
How to move shrugging shoulders with ease
To lift or lower a shrugging shoulder without struggling too much with tight joints, we first need to understand the skeleton structure of a doll's shoulder. Dolls with shrugging shoulders usually have 3 or 4 articulating points on each side of the shoulder. We will name these points of articulations A, B, C, and D for easier identification.
Shoulder with 3 articulations looks like this.
While a shoulder with 4 articulations looks like this.
On some brands of dolls, the position of C and D are swapped but they perform the same movements regardless.
A is responsible for abduction and adduction movements.
B is responsible for flexion and extension movements.
C is responsible for elevation and depression movements.
Lastly, D is responsible for protraction and retraction movements. Of course, a shrugging shoulder with only 3 articulations will not be able to do protraction and retraction movements.
The reason why it's not easy to move shrugging shoulders is that manufacturers tend to over-tighten the joints at C and D.
Our goal here is to reposition the arm and lock A's rotation so that by doing an abduction or adduction movement, the whole arm rotates C instead of A.
Disclaimer: Make sure your doll has shrugging shoulders and consult your doll instruction manual on the range of movement of the limbs before attempting to do these manoeuvres. I will not hold any responsibility if you break or tear your doll's shoulders and arms when performing the steps below. In addition, if there is a doll out there that does not have articulation A and B but has some kind of ball joint for moving the arm instead, the method I described below will very likely not work.
Here are the steps in detail:
1. Ready your doll in an upright neutral position with arms down.
2. Do a flexion movement and bring the arm up parallel to the ground.
3. Do a horizontal abduction movement by swinging the arm out. At this point, the axis of rotation at A is changed from Z to Y-axis and thus locking A's ability to do an abduction or adduction movement.
4. Now, when you grab the upper arm and lift or lower it vertically, you are in fact rotating C (shoulder's elevation and depression movements) instead of A. Since the arm is acting as a lever, you can raise or lower the shrugging shoulder this way easily without relying on brute force.
5. Once you have acquired the desired position of the shrugging shoulder, reverse above steps 3 and 2 to get the doll back to the neutral position.
I've seen someone make a YouTube video showing these simple steps before but for the life of me, I can't seem to find that video anymore. So, I decided to do a write-up and copypasta this to anyone who asks how to move shrugging shoulders.
I hope this will be helpful to this doll community as well.
Cheers.
Edit: updated step 5
Reason: by user request via PM to mods
Re: How to move shrugging shoulders with ease
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Re: How to move shrugging shoulders with ease
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Re: How to move shrugging shoulders with ease
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- Wheezer
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Re: How to move shrugging shoulders with ease
This should be a sticky.
Cheers!
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Re: How to move shrugging shoulders with ease
- Musiclover
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Re: How to move shrugging shoulders with ease
Any advice, insights on moving back joints that won t move?
Yvonne, Olivia, carmen 165E viewtopic.php?t=156925
Valerie fashion thread viewtopic.php?t=156315
Scarlett fashion thread viewtopic.php?t=156312
Andi fashion thread viewtopic.php?t=156314
Shawnie thread viewtopic.php?t=149673
Re: How to move shrugging shoulders with ease
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Re: How to move shrugging shoulders with ease
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Re: How to move shrugging shoulders with ease
Re: How to move shrugging shoulders with ease
p.s. I did get instructions with my doll, but it was completely in Chinese and not very good diagrams (not as good as in this thread).
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