John Zizolfo’s Terminator Endoskeleton
from 1999
This is the Horizon Terminator Endoskeleton kit, heavily modified and detailed! Originally a vinyl kit, I proceeded to cut it apart far more than even Horizon had probably intended for people to do and went all out working the kit to its limits.
The pose is directly from the first shot of the Endo in the beginning of the film…
A metal foot crushes a child’s skull…slowly tilt up to reveal a chrome Terminator Endoskeleton on its rounds, hunting down remaining humans.
Overall, the kit is very well detailed as far as surface sculpting. However, limitations of the design of a vinyl kit versus the design of the Endo left a lot of the “open” areas of the kit filled in. Horizon’s instruction sheet suggested either painting the “open” areas black, or cut away the areas and fill in the back sides of the arm and leg pistons with putty. I chose the second option however, initial tests proved that it would take more work than just puttying to make this look good. (There was also no way back at this point, short of buying a new kit!)
1) First things first! When I first examined the kit, the first modification that came to mind was that it HAD to have LED’s in the eyes! Any kit of the Endo would be incomplete without this modification. The 2 LED’s are wired in parallel with the necessary resistor also buried in the head. The wires run down through the body, out the heels (more on that later), through the base and out the bottom of the base where the power source is connected. The jaw was also carved out to create holes and areas where you could see through the small cheek pistons. (Those are probably the only pistons in the kit I didn’t re-build!)
2) The largest area of work occured right here, the chest cavity. The original part had the two halves of the shoulders molded in place with the neck attached at either side. Everything below the shoulders (where the sides of the rib cage would be on a human skeleton) was just smoothed over, as if someone filled the entire chest cavity with clay (this is one of the areas the instructions suggested painting black). A few small pistons were supposed to be glued to the ends of the shoulders, with the “chest” end of the pistons just stuck into depressions in the “black” area. I started by cutting away the “black” area. Once that was done, I realized there was no way I could use the shoulder pieces molded with the kit, aside from the discs on the very ends that the arms attached to. Cutting those pieces away now left me with a completely hollow chest cavity.
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Starting with a 2 inch piece of 1 inch diameter plastic tubing, I proceeded to re-construct the shoulder interior. The final part ended up looking like a small rolling pin, with smaller pieces sticking out about 1/8″ from each end. This being the major assembly to detailing the chest, I completed it first, but glued it in place last. Leaving it out until the end gave me room to work (not much, but every little bit helps) to sheet plastic, putty and spare part detail the rest of the inner chest cavity (close inspection of my completed model reveals 2 truck wheel hubs, an aircraft emergency hatch ladder and a few racing car engine parts). The wiring for the eyes was secured through the chest during this whole process. I left about 3 inches of wire sticking out the top of the neck, and about a foot of wire from the bottom of the chest. This gave me slack to work with throughout the rest of the construction
3) The upper arms were the simplest of what would become a tedious process. After removing the arms’ “black” areas and remains of half molded pistons, I built new pistons from Evergeen tubing. Overall, I ended up with about 8 subsequent sizes of Evergreen, from 3/64″ rod up to 5/16″ tube. Major arm and leg pistons are 1/8″ tubing cores with increasingly larger sizes creating the various piston elements. The inner areas of the arms and legs also got the same sheet plastic and putty treatment as the chest cavity, but only enough spare parts to fill in larger gaps, as opposed to surface detail.
4) The forearms were another challenge. After doing the requisite cutaway work, the hands seemed very swelled compared to the new clean, smooth pistons I had built. This, combined with the fact that the right hand would have to be modified anyway (to hold the battle rifle), prompted me to proceed to build a complete set of hands from the smaller sizes of rod and tubing. Each finger, from tip to wrist, consists of 9 sections of rod/tubing, many no more than 1/8″ long. A typical finger part list looks something like this:
Finger tip
- Finger tip joint (knuckle)
- 2nd section
- 2nd section joint
- 3rd section
- 3rd section joint
- Tendon (back of hand)
- Tendon detail (slightly larger size)
- Palm tendon (small diameter rod)
Each knuckle, being cut from tubing, also had a smaller piece of rod through its center to solidify its appearance. The only thing that worked in my favor on the arms was that they were designed to bend at the elbow, part of the inspiration to place the gun in the Endo’s hand.
5) The thighs received much the same treatment as the upper arms. Thighs consisted of 2 per leg of the largest diameter pistons, one front and one rear, and one smaller diameter piston as a detail on the rear outer edge. The right leg was also cut apart at the knee and accordingly re-constructed, as the kit’s legs were molded with straight standing knees. Pyramid shaped kneecaps were also added.
The lighting wires, now having been run through the pelvic area, exit where the top of the larger rear piston attaches, briefly loops around the piston joint and enters the piston center. The wire proceeds down through the rear calf piston, through the ankle, and out a hole drilled at the end of the heel.
6) The calves were done with smaller diameter tubing, similar to the forearms. I decided not to start rebuilding the feet as I did the hands. Partly because of the amount of work involved to do the hands, and partly because the finished hands were more delicate than the vynil originals. This was fine for them, since they didn’t have to support any weight. The feet however, would provide some of the structural support for the kit, so I felt that they should remain as one solid piece. I did however, replace the bottoms of the feet with 5 pieces of tubing, which also helped support the figure a little better.
7) The base is a resin casting I bought at a Chiller Theater Halloween Horror Convention. The pile of skulls is exactly that, 15-20 resin skulls purchased from another vendor at Chiller. Spackling compound fills in the gaps between the skulls, while dirt from the flower garden sprinkled onto the wet spackle provides the needed nuclear winter fallout.
8) The battle rifle is another resin cast product, ordered from Comet Miniatures in England (I don’t know if they still sell it, or if they’re even still in business. You’ll have to investigate that for yourself!) The gun is also detailed up with some spare parts bits and pieces.
Not shown – A friend runs a nameplate engraving business from his home. He carved me a 1″ x 4″ steel plaque with Sarah (Linda Hamilton) Connor’s opening voiceover from the film…
The survivors of the nuclear fire
called the war “Judgment Day”.
they lived only to face a new nightmare,
the war against the machines…
John Zizolfo
