Azone Shoes Customization Project

So here I am posting a little thread about my progress in customizing some Azone shoes I purchased a while back. The shoes I customized are the Ellen's Closet Strap Shoes which now are hard to find in any other color except brown. Story goes that ever since I got my first custom DD head, Amane, I purchased an Obitsu 50 cm body due to budget reasons and because DDP bodies weren't available when I got her. Contrary to my first initial opinion of Obitsu bodies, I fell in love with the body especially with the magnetic feet that attaches easily to the base. I loved it so much that it was hard for me to say goodbye to it when I switched Amane to a DDP body. 

At the moment, it's a little impossible for me to customize DDP feet so instead, I came up with the next best idea to fufill my need... customize shoes, by adding magnets to the end of the soles. I got this idea from Obitsu plastic magnetic shoes. Since the Ellen's Closet shoes have a wood sole, they would be perfect to carve some holes in them. By doing this, I would be able to have Amane on an Obitsu base and also use them for the current owner of the Obitsu body, Cleo, whose magnetic feet only attach to the base with shoes of smaller sole!

So I purchased the magnets from K&J Magnetics. They are great but, unfortunately, I purchased the wrong size because I was too lazy to measure and I blindly went by the pictures. I wanted them large enough to take up a good section of the front and back part of the shoe to have a good magnetic force but it wouldn't be possible with such small size of the magnets. Luckily, I made it work since I bought four magnets instead of two, so I went with two on the front and then two at the back (heel) area.

 

First I drew where exactly I wanted the magnets. It was a little difficult to make an outline of such tiny magnets.

 

Then I used my Dremel rotary tool to carve out the holes. It was a slow progress of measuring of the hole to get the exact depth since I didn't want to drill in the wood to deep. Some of the holes came out perfect but some of them I went a little overboard in diameter. Nevertheless, they weren't too big so it would just require of me to fill in the extra space with glue. 

 

Lastly, I used Liquid Nails because it is a good all-purpose strong adhesive. I cleaned up the extra glue with a damp cloth and set them aside to dry.

 

After having them dry for 24 hours. I tested them out and now they are perfect! The magnetic force was great since they attach to the base without being too strong or too weak. Here is Amane, my DDP, on an Obitsu base! 

With this project, my next goal is to keep on searching for the other Ellen's Closet Strap shoes (Black and Dark Brown) and any Azone or Volks wood sole shoes to add magnets to. I'll probably also test this on some Azone plastic sole shoes. They do need to meet some requirements on the sole before I can approach this next customizing experiment. 😊

Perfect!

Great idea!  I will need to do this too for my Luluna shoes so she can use her stand. 

Great customization!

Have you tried making furniture or other accessories?

8 hours ago, luisjavier_osorio said:

Great customization!

Have you tried making furniture or other accessories?

Maybe one day! I haven't done much small-scale woodwork to attempt furniture. 

On 10/16/2020 at 8:19 PM, solebria said:

Maybe one day! I haven't done much small-scale woodwork to attempt furniture. 

That's OK. I even haven't done 1:1 scale XD

This is so cool! I love the idea. Thank you so much for sharing!