AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

Careful now, don’t encourage him. All this power could go to his head. “Power corrupts, and absolute power…yada yada.”

Surely you still have access to the helicopter and private jet?

Congratulations, well deserved.

Wait, what? A helicopter and private jet!? Why do you know about that and I didn’t? And who has them?

[glares at Don] So, you’ve been lording it about in that Lamborghini, keeping me distracted, eh? [shakes cane in some random, hopefully Don-ish direction] We’ll see about that! I’ll… I’ll… I’ll put some fingerprints on your windshield next time I find your car parked somewhere! HA!

Several places sell extenders you can use with a vacuum bell and sleeve instead of a sled and noose. They usually use threaded rods and springs to set tension. I was going to make my own, but the shortage of round tuits led me to simple buy one.

I got the “Total Man” extender. It’s large device, over a foot long. 350mm-ish, I guess. It has a round base ring, pivoted rods, and a sliding bridge with a hook for the vacuum bell.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t happy with the device at all, but after procrastinating on writing a review, Total Man discontinued that extender and now they sell a completely different one.

I wound up doing a number of modifications.

First, the bridge mostly wouldn’t slide. It would lock in place and took a fair amount of wiggling and tugging to get it to move. It turned out that the spacing of the rods where they attached to the base ring was narrower than the bridge, so the rods were canted out slightly, sort of like an old-time “rabbit ear” TV antenna. I ordered some 6mm stainless steel washers to adjust the rods outward. That helped some, but not a lot.

The hook for attaching the bell was very… hooky. I had to back the adjuster nuts way off to get connected, then crank them way back to start applying load. I cut about 12mm off the hook; there’s plenty of curve left to keep the bell from sliding off, and I don’t have to crank on the nuts so much.

The base screws were too long, and about a thread stuck into the center of the base ring. The threads are sharp. Also, the nylon-filled self-locking nuts had bits of nylon sticking out where they had been deformed by the screws. They were sharp enough to snag on the sleeve, and of course dug into skin pretty good, too. I added some more washers so the ends of the screws weren’t sticking out, and filed down the sharp plastic bits.

The bridge still tended to lock up instead of sliding. I did some measuring and found some thinwall brass tube online. I drilled out the holes in the bridge and pressed the tubes in. There’s less clearance than the original plastic holes, which keeps the bridge straighter, and there threaded rod can’t bite into the brass like it did with the bare plastic. That helped a lot.

Due to my still-sizeable gut it wasn’t easy to see the base ring and the adjuster nuts at the same time, and the extender would try to “parallelogram” if the nuts weren’t pretty close to the same position. And then the bridge would bind up, since that narrowed the rod spacing. I made a thick crossbar out of aluminum and used a couple of extra 6mm nuts to bolt it to the open end of the extender. The crossbar is thick enough to keep the base ring from getting cocked, it’s easier to keep the nuts out at equal distance, and the bridge slides freely at all times.

The base ring had cutouts for the self-locking nuts. The screws turn a bit with the rods when you flip the extender up and down; since the nuts are self-locking, they move with the screws. And they’d pinch skin in between the hex and the cutout in the ring. Total Man advertises the base ring as “large diameter”, but the inside diameter is only 1.9”, which is very tight for me. I heated up some ShapeLock plastic and filled and smoothed the cutouts. Normally ShapeLock sticks very well to plastics, but the Total Man device appears to be made of a white polystyrene, and ShapeLock doesn’t stick to that very well. If the filler pieces fall out, I’ll reattach them with glue.

The springs that came with the extender were very strong. I swapped them for the less-powerful springs I had been using in the Size Doctor extender.

The base ring is a full circle and much smaller than the vacuum bell. This means I have to put the extender on first, then the bell, then unfold the sleeve. This can be an adventure, as the sleeve has to be worked through the hole in the base ring.

That’s pretty much it, so far. I’m using it regularly now. It looks like I’m going to have to make my own extender anyway, or at least a new base ring, bridge, and crossmember. My “traffic cone” shape means it pinches at the base after a while. And I’m going to try making a U-shaped base like the Size Doctor, so I can put the vacuum bell on first, then the extender. I didn’t have any problems with the base sliding out of position with the Size Doctor; the fat pad kept it anchored even when flipped in the “wrong” direction.
(and you thought a fat pad wasn’t good for anything…)

Oh, yeah, there’s more. The extender would only pivot about 45 degrees. I wanted to be able to do 180 degrees. The corners of the eyelets on the ends of the rods hit the sides of the ring at 45 degrees. I whittled some off the ring and some off the eyelets until the ring would spin 360 degrees between the rods.

Also, I ordered an Ohaus spring scale that went up to 4.5 pounds, cut some wood to make an adapter plate for the base, drilled a hole, and ran some threaded rod through, so I could pull on the scale through the ring. Then I measured the spring length at 3, 3.5, 4, and 4.5 pounds. The next step is to make a gage plate about the size of a credit card, so I can set the tension on the springs after I get the extender on.

I will be looking forward to learning about your homemade device. Please keep us posted.

I have feelthy peekchurs…

This is the scale and the tensioner fixture. It’s just stuck together for the picture. The nut on the right pulls the scale down against its spring. I used a dial caliper to measure the distance between the bridge and the adjuster nuts.

Detail of the top crossmember. It would have been better with some square bar, but the 1/4 inch thickness is enough to keep it rigid. You can see the ends of the brass tubes sticking up slightly out of the bridge.

The hook originally curve almost back up to the nut. I lopped it off and rounded the edges.

As frequently happenens, the autofocus didn’t work. It’s a common thread across multiple cameras.

Modified base ring. I took some off the insides of the black pivot pieces, then some off the four corners on the ring. You can see the asymmetrical washer placement to get the rod spacing to match the bridge.

The dabs of ShapeLock worked to keep the nuts from rotating and pinching skin, but I’m going to have to dip the ring in hot water so I can reshape the dabs before gluing them in. They won’t stick to the white plastic at all.

Detail of the calibration jig. Just some scrap plywood and one of the rods for the homemade extender I haven’t finished yet.

Despite having a reasonably-equipped machine shop at my disposal, I whittled away the excess plastic with a utility knife. I was pretty disgusted with the contraption and didn’t see any reason to put extra effort into prettywork.

It works OK now, but I’m still piqued at the amount of work I had to put into it to get to that point.

I still need to make the setting gage.

The scale only goes to 4.5 pounds. Once I’m able to handle that much tension, I can either extrapolate the numbers I took with the tester, or I can blow another $10 and get a scale with a higher weight limit.

Cool rig Andy.

These are linear springs, so the loading is constant right?

I assume that the load deflection was not given on the springs during purchase.

You should only have to measure it once to know what the loading is at any given compression set point, such as grams/pounds per inch of compression.

Yep, plain old helical springs from the hardware store.

What I have up is a sort of credit-card-size piece of aluminum with the corners cut back to 1.21” (4.5#), 1.35” (4#), 1.43” (3.5#), and 1.62” (3#). Then I can use use the appropriate side as a spacer to adjust the nuts without having to mess around with the dial caliper.

If I need more than 4.5” I’ll get another scale, run a new set of measurements, and make another gage.

Between the Size Doctor, the Total Man extender, and all the springs I bought playing with the Size Doctor, I have quite a collection of springs…

Very cool Andy. I recently made a version of Cantlook’s “darknight”. It is very sturdy and rigid. Just as yours looks. Keep us posted on how you are liking it.

Maybe you should name your device and put together another thread with the details of building and how to use it. I. Sure that would be helpful. These mass produced extenders are so shit.

Which one was the Dark Knight? Cantlook did a bunch of extender designs, and I’ve forgotten which was which.