need tips -pimp my prosthesis

[adrienne]

hi, i have a new friend who was born with a transradial amputation. i have never known what the experience is like, and am very interested in it. i was doing some research and was thinking that people should be more proud of their amputations and use it as opportunity to show off :) i am looking for some pimped out hooks, not necessicarily a functional prosthetic, but something more fashionable or artistic/expressive (even with some *bling*!). id love to learn more. thanks a lot!

[Jon Kuniholm]

Adriene -

Mostly what is done now in this area is decoration of the frame, as shown here:
http://blog.mlive.com/citpat/2007/11/mans_bionic_ankle_is_a_mechani...
That's not to say that a somewhat decorative hook might not be an interesting idea. One difficulty you will have is that fabricating something like this can be difficult and expensive. See out discussion about the manufacturing possibilities for the Trautman Hook here:
http://openprosthetics.org/concepts/55/the-trautman-hook

A possibility we've considered recently is making a pattern out of the plastic wax material used by printapart.com, and sending it to a sandcasting company. If you come up with something that needs to get made, we can figure out how to do it.

Jon

[Bill Taylor]

hi adrienne,

here's a cool link....

http://www.swisswuff.ch/tech/?p=35

i've made a couple decorative hand-substitutes for myself, but nothing as well executed or well designed as these. i have thought about making an all-hardwood, kinda cross between a wooden spoon and a wooden spatula to screw into the end of my pros...wouldn't be too functional, but would look cool. i have tried a fake hand, and found it's extra length [over my hook] and inflexibility to be very awkward, especially in driving, so i just ended up using it on halloween, going as a weird 2-handed man.

hope this helps,

peace, bill

[Wolf Schweitzer]

i am seriously going down the route of pimping my stuff - also to look cool. it all started when i wanted to put a mannequin hand on my wrist. a friend offered to mill some bolts. we immediately found out that around the same time my bolts started to lose grip inside the wrist, his bolts were too thin. we then found awfully wide tolerances in the otterbock bolts and decided to investigate, reason behind all that being the otterbock wrist mechanism combined with the terminal device bolts.

for fashionable rocknroll to play out you need a working quickrelease wrist lock that is stable. so we currently work towards a new wrist in order to get back what we really wanted to do - play around with various terminal devices.

- i have a mannequin hand that - in the meantime - has been brush painted to an acrylic paint glossy red. then i'll test that before i will go for the next appearance whatever that will be.

- i got myself a cosmetic leather prosthesis off ebay with movable plastic fingers. super light, super comfy, check the webpage pics posted.

- there's a wooden hand as used by painters - realistically sized - lying around, will see how that "feels" once we got our final version of the wrist out.

- and then there are other options we have not tapped into yet but will do so in due time. one friend of mine is a mold designer, and so i'm in good hope that we can lay hands on some elegant freeform plastic shapes in due time.

-

now, bill, if your problem is the long hand (too long) with a hook the right length, maybe you could try to get your technician to play with the wrist? i have a long forearm stump and had that problem too. i use a pin liner, and the otterbock standard wrist unit now has been fashioned to lack a previously / initially present floor / base plate. now it allows the pin to protrude into the wrist. to avoid collision with the terminal device's bolt the bolt inside is drilled away so the hook and hand bolts all have holes. overall, that saved me about 2,5-3,0 cm of length so now my prosthetic right hand is at the same place / level as the real left one.

[Bill Taylor]

hi wolf,

thanks for the advice. i've chosen to work for two not-for-profit organizations, rather than for high-paying corporate jobs, so, i'm not able to afford to have work done by prosthetists here, nor buy the prosthetic parts whose availability they control. i am therefore very interested in designs which i can fabricate or modify myself. i'm fairly skilled at things that go into that, so i'm hoping this site can give me new ideas and techniques that i can build on.

[Wolf Schweitzer]

yes same here.

we are neither happy about some of the manufacturing quality nor pricing, leave alone customer service.

current works:

wiggling hook joint - fixed: http://www.swisswuff.ch/tech/?p=166

wrist revised - added some explanations how it works: http://www.swisswuff.ch/tech/?p=157