Barbie Arm Transplants

Why would I want this, you ask? The thing that caused me to look into arm transplants was that I was customizing a Mermaid Fantasy Barbie, and I wanted her to have jointed arms. I was looking for a way to switch out the static arms with the arms of a doll which would preferably have joints at the elbows and wrists. I didn't see anyone else doing this online, so I had to experiment.

I was a little aggressive with this first trial. Really, I just wanted to see what was going on in there and if what I was trying to do was even possible. And, as you can see, the right arm doesn't look half bad. But it also isn't perfect by any means.

Here's what the arm peg looks like.

To get the arm out, I heated the joint with a hairdryer so that the warm plastic might be a little easier to pull apart with minimal damage.

It was a bit of a struggle to get the arm off. A crease formed in the plastic where it kept running into the shoulder joint. I sanded it down, but, as you can see, that didn't get rid of it completely. I also ended up cracking the seam down the middle of the body. Since this was a throw-away doll for me, I wasn't too concerned about damaging it. However, I was able to get the tan arm off of its body without cracking the seam at all. Though, I did have trouble getting the pale arm in the tan body without the extra room made by prying the seam open.

In the end, either the body or arm became too mangled for it to be worth it. Feel free to try it on your own, now knowing what to expect a little more than before. The arms of jointed dolls are a different plastic, so they would probably hold up better than the softer plastic dolls that I used to experiment with.

Here's the subject of my next experiment. When I first looked up arm transplants, this was the only method that I came across: take the bottom halves of a jointed doll's arms and supplant them onto someone else.

Here, I'm using the arms of an MC2 doll. I bought it because I thought her hair and dress were pretty, but in the end, the doll wasn't lol. And so Skipper inherited her hair, dress, and now her arms.

First, I sawed off her arms at the elbow and smoothed out the plastic with a Dremel. Sandpaper will work fine as well.

Next, I drilled a hole in her arm, also using the Dremel.

Then I just plugged the hole with the arm peg. Don't use glue or you won't have as large a range of motion. The hole was a little big on one side for me, so I used a small bit of hot glue on the peg to bulk it up. That solved it.

This works, but you do have the obvious issue of the joints being ugly. You could easily dress the doll in log sleeves to solve this.

I covered the joints with some ribbon that matched my doll's dress, and I'm happy with the way that looks.

Arm transplanting isn't exactly a must-have for doll customizing, but since I had a hard time finding any resources on the topic, I figured I'd share what I know.

Comment below if you discover any new results experimenting with this! I'd love to see what you guys come up with.

Love, Haley #dollrepaints #howtorepaintdolls #dollrepainting #repaintingtips #customdolls #customactionfigures #custombarbies #custommonsterhigh #blog #artblog #customcollectables #artdolls #dollart #Mrsuperclear #msc #rerooting #toycollector #Etsy #Etsyseller #monsterhigh #barbie #balljointeddoll #bjd #dollhair #customdollhair