With the duct tape shell completed, you’ll need to construct a skeleton that will go inside of the duct tape shell for support and rigidity.

The basic skeleton was made out of 1-1/4" pipe. I sized each piece of pipe by centering and measuring the spans based upon my own bone structure. Keep in mind that the pipe needs to be pretty much centered in each leg and the chest cavity, just like your own bones.

The styrofoam wig head I used was way undersized for my head... so, I sized the neck support pipe to put the top of the styrofoam head at the same height as me. This sort of gives it a whole "Kamino" appearance.

I wasn’t sure whether the arms would have enough rigidity in the final mannequin if I didn’t put a length of pipe into each arm… or if having pipe in the arms would make it too rigid to dress. To keep my options open, I decided to not put pipe in the arms, but to use a pipe Tee at the shoulder connection point just in case I needed to add a piece of pipe later. As it turned out, the arms were plenty rigid without the added pipe, and I DID need them to be a bit more flexible to get them into the arms of my flightsuit when I dressed the mannequin. If you decide to build this mannequin and want the arms to be bent, go ahead and include the shoulder Tee’s and glue in a reducing bushing in the open end of each Tee so that you can use a piece of copper tubing in the arms for “posing”. The copper tubing would slide into the reducing bushing at each shoulder end.

One area that I gave quite a bit of thought to was the feet. I was concerned that it I made the feet portion solid to the legs that I would have problems dressing the mannequin, or not be able to get the feet into my boots, or not have enough support to make the mannequin free standing. I decided to go with a removable foot set using 1” pipe for the feet for two main reasons. One, they would fit into my boots. Two, and most importantly, the 1” pipe slides snugly into the inside of the 1-1/4” pipe.

For each foot, I constructed an "L" shaped portion out of the 1" pipe. I used about a 3" to 4" long piece of pipe for the portion of the foot that would go inside the boot, and glued it into one end of the 90 degree elbow. Next, I used an 18" long piece of pipe and glued into the other side of the elbow. In this set-up, the 18” long piece of pipe slides snuggly into the inside diameter of the 1-1/4" pipe that will make up a leg, and the 1-1/4" leg pipe rests on the lip of the pipe elbow when the skeleton is stood up.

Next, Stuffing the Mannequin....