Needless to say, that glut of cash was soon used up...
About a week later, my nice big parcel arrived in the mail from Japan. When I opened it, Roy looked as if he was, indeed, in very good condition. His outfit is smart and clean, his sculpting is perfect...
... but when I removed Roy from the box, there was a nasty surprise waiting for me. There's one thing about Roy which is not in good condition. See if you can tell what it is:
Totally not something you should mention in an eBay listing.
Needless to say, I
After
Anyway, now to fix Roy.
Roy is from Medicom Toys' "Real Action Heroes" series (pretty tacky sounding name, but they're nice figures) and they're notoriously pretty touchy. I hear a lot of people asking how to fix them when they invariably have accidents, which is actually what made me decide to start this blog.
Before I begin, here's a picture of the break (incidentally, the very picture I sent the seller). As you can see, the neck has snapped off at the base:
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| When I received Roy, his stand had not been opened and he had some slight damage to the front of his hair. I'm guessing he fell off a shelf and busted his neck. |
Drilling and pinning is one of the more difficult figure repairs, but if you're up to it, it usually has pretty solid results.
Here are the tools I used (excluding glue):
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| From left: Pliers, wire cutters, a tiny screwdriver, 1.25mm diameter wire. |
For something like this, wire with a diameter between 1 and 1.5 mm is probably best, since it's a pretty small joint.
Anyway, I used the screwdriver to drill a hole into each half of the broken joint. Each side should be drilled a few millimetres deep.
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| The neck joint, after drilling. (Yeah, RAH figures are really designed to have clothes on...) |
To make the plastic easier to work with, I warm the neck joint over the heater. PVC is a thermoplastic, meaning it becomes soft when heated. Warming it is advantageous for two reasons:
1. It's easier to drill because it's softer,
2. It's less brittle and less likely to snap under the pressure of the drilling.
You don't want to heat the plastic so much that it looses its shape, so just use a warm hairdryer or a gentle heater for this (at about 100ºC, PVC actually melts into a liquid).
OK, now for the pinning.
The first thing is to cut a bit of wire just long enough that it fills in the holes you drilled when you fit the joint back together (IE, the length of wire should be equal to the combined lengths of the drilled holes). You might need to fiddle around with this to get the length right.
Here's a picture of my bit of wire and Roy's head to give an idea of scale:
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| The wire ended up about 1cm long. |
The next thing to do is glue the wire into the joint.
To find the right adhesive for this, I spent a couple of days mucking around with different types of glue (testing them on old broken Nendoroid joints to see if they worked). After a few duds, I finally came up with something which seemed to do a good job. Since it was hard finding the right glue for this job, I ended up writing a whole article on the subject so that everybody else can learn from my failures: http://figurefixer.blogspot.com.au/p/more-about-adhesives-glue.html
I glued the wire into one side of the joint and waited until it was dry before I glued the other side (it's just less difficult that way).
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| You can see the wire sticking out of the base of Roy's neck. In the foreground is a small bit of wire – I used it to spread the glue all the way to the bottom of the hole I drilled. |
... and wait...
... and wait...
... and wait...
Finally this morning, Roy's new neck joint was ready to test!
I had my doubts about the glue, but it actually worked really well. It's a little spongier than (I assume) it would have been originally, but all the joints still work and Roy can move his neck and head as much as (I think) he ever could.
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| Roy is back to normal. |
Good luck with your repairs, everyone!
Cheers! Sparkey.
