Anyone who has a Moon Suit in their collection has likely lost the rubber arms due to age. I currently have three moon suits. Two came to me with missing arms. One I bought 20 years ago with fully intact and working arms. Since that time the rubber has become brittle and the arms have cracked apart just like dried leaves. Recently I decided to do something about that and restore all 3 moon suits.

I started my search for replacement arms on eBay and I did find someone selling their version of replacement arms. These were made from automotive hosing and lego claws. I very much liked the look of them but they were not pose-able and would not work with the original hose and pump (actually they are pose-able if a very thick wire is used inside). Unless I can find replacements that are made just like the originals, using the air pump was likely out of the question. Actually, thinking about this now, I consider pose-ability as paramount. I started to look around for “found” items that I could modify into arms. After a lot of thought, I may have found something that may work as substitute arms.

My idea is to use an inexpensive flexible tripod to build replacement arms. I can get one of these for under $5 online. I hope to modify two of the legs and retain the foam covering and the flexible core to act as arms. I’m still looking around for what to do about the hands but I’m sure I can figure something out. Perhaps I can make some matching hands with Fimo or some such thing.

I’ll document the restoration process here in the next few months once I do some more research (I’ll also post my research here too).

UPDATE: May 2017

After waiting for several months for the delivery of the tripod, a package finally showed up and inside was … not a tripod. So I’ve placed another order and I’ll have to wait again. I order stuff from China all the time and this is the first time something has screwed up. What bothers me though is the time it’s taking to receive anything. Last year it would take 30 days to North America. Now it’s taking 60 to 90 days. Ugh!

UPDATE: October 2021

I was tooling around the interwebs recently and noticed that someone posted that they had made replacement arms for their moon suit and they posted an image of the finished result. It looked very good to me and appeared they had used something that resembled automotive parts. Nowhere in the article was it mentioned what specific part was used but I recognized it as resembling a black rubber boot such as a clutch cable boot.

I’ve looked around eBay and various other sites but so far have not had much luck. Many of the available boots are for bicycle brakes and are very small. I bought a 10 pack to see for myself and, yep, they are too small. I’ll keep looking around but this kind of item would be perfect if I can find the right size. Then I’d need to make something for hands.

UPDATE: April 2024

I finally got a flexible tripod and after taking it apart I think this may work as a kind of substitute arms.

Here it is with the tripod legs shortened down to around 1.5 inches long. I kept the foot cap as it works well as a shoulder. With some slight modification they fit into the holes left if your remove the white cylinders where the old rubber attached to the suit. I modified the upper part of the tripod leg to work as a hand.

The arms are bendable since all that is inside them is 1/8th inch armature wire that is easy to cut and bend. They can bend slightly as you can see here but it’s enough for now.

I drilled a hole through the left hand cup shape and then cut a slot for a hand. It doesn’t look half bad (see bottom image holding a radiation detector). I did not modify the right hand as I think it kind of looks like a Zeroid magnetic hand so I may drop in a magnet here if I can find one.

I have 3 moon suits in my collection so I will be trying different arm replacements on each one.