Generic Action Figure Repairs - Two Methods to Fix Most Breaks!

Greetings!

So I've been looking at my stats recently, and I am getting a lot of refers from people looking for info on fixing broken Figmas.
I haven't actually managed to break any of my Figmas yet, but they're not so different in the way they work to a lot of other figures, so here I will be explaining two methods of repairing figures which are applicable to almost all PVC toys (including Figmas!) and can probably fix over 90% of breaks!

OK, first up, I'll explain the difference between a low stress area and a high stress area:

Low stress areas are not put under much pressure. They're usually not moving parts and if they are, then they're only moved minimally.
If you want to fix one of these, read Method No.1.

High stress areas are the things which break most often. They're things like shoulders, knees, necks, elbows, hips, etc, which have quite a lot of stress put on them when the figure is being played with.
If you want to fix one of these, read Method No.2.

Method No.1 – Supa Glue
For low stress repairs.
This is a really good (and DUH obvious) method for visible areas which are not part of a moving joint. It would be great for non-posable scale figures, snapped accessories (like swords or firearms) or other small things.

The example figure I will be repairing is Nendoroid Millhiore F. Biscotti!
Isn't she pretty?

Unfortunately, just after I got her, she fell of her horse... er... bird... er... mount and her ahoge broke where it attaches to her head!

Ahoge means "foolish hair" in Japanese, and, if you didn't know already, that's the silly bit of hair sticking out at the top of her head.

In Nendoroids, large ahoge like this are actually posable! You can rotate it from side to side so it can point in any direction (I love Nendoroids)!
I would not recommend trying to fix anything which will be put under higher stress than this ahoge with glue alone. I'm careful when I'm posing it now, but it's been a few months and it hasn't broken yet.
I didn't take any pictures of it when it was broken because it was before I started this blog, but here's a shot of how it looks now:

You can see the break just above where it attaches to her head.

Anyway, after freaking out and practically crying (she is nothing without her ahoge! NOTHING, I tell you!) I glued it back on with supa glue.

This is very easy.

Just put glue on the broken surface and then push the two parts together until the glue grabs. This usually takes about 30 seconds or so.

If it doesn't grab the first time, it probably means you used too much or too little glue. Don't be discouraged if you have to try this a few times with different amounts of glue... oh yeah, and don't get the glue on your skin because it sticks to people :O

Note: Supa glue only works on really clean fractures, so if the plastic around your break is a little mushy, you might want to try a different adhesive. For info on choosing the right one for the job, have a look at my glue info page.

As you can see, the supa glue worked a treat on Princess Biscotti. Her ahoge is even still posable!

Look at that ahoge go!
(This looks way better when you're listening to fast music)

Another example of where this method is really useful:
Figma Marisa's cup had come unstuck from her hand and needed to be re-glued.

And that's Method No.1.

Method No.2 – Drilling & Pinning

This is my personal favourite method for fixing high stress fractures: this includes action figure joints! YES, THAT MEANS FIGMAS!

The equipment required is not necessarily the kind of stuff that everybody has lying in their desk drawers, but if you're a figure collector, these tools are an invaluable resource and well worth the small amount of money you will pay for them.

All of these things are easily obtainable from hardware stores, hobby shops and online!

This is the method I used to fix RAH Roy Mustang's broken head, which you can read about here!

For now, however, the figure I will be demonstrating on is Pure neemo Kanata Sorami!

Poor Kanata. Her knee joint popped out and so I took off her boots and trousers to fix it, but in doing so, I broke her foot off! *facepalm*

Even though she can still stand with the foot off (I just jam her leg into her boot) I wanted to fix it, because she's just not the same with an amputation.

Here's the busted foot and the ankle it's busted off:

The foot snapped off at the ankle joint.

Pure neemo ankles are extremely similar to Nendoroid and Figma joints!

Something like this is way too small and gets put under way too much strain to be fixable with glue alone, so I'm going to drill a hole in each side of the joint and insert a bit of wire before gluing.

Here is Kanata with the tools I will be using:

Anticlockwise from top: 1.25mm wire, pin vice with drill bits, a suitable adhesive for mending PVC,
wire cutters, pliers, a 1/6 scale designer Bauhaus chair for Kanata to sit in while I work (optional).

To start, drill a small hole into the fractured surface on each of the ankle and the foot. The holes should be roughly 3-4 millimetres deep (for my empirical friends, that's about 1/8") and the drill bit you use should be the same width as your wire, or as close as possible. My closest drill bit is 1.3mm and that works fine with the 1.25mm wire.

Me using a pin vice, in case you were wondering what it does exactly. It's
basically just a little handle for a drill bit.
(My hands aren't usually purple – I have eczema and it's cold.)

The foot, after drilling.

Notice, in the above picture, that there is a centreline in the joint. This is not a mould line. It is the juncture of two separate pieces of plastic. It is the movement of the two pieces against each other which makes the joint functional.
Also notice how the hole I drilled does not go directly through the centreline, but instead to one side of it, through the original broken surface.
If you glue a wire through more than one of these pieces of plastic then the joint will be frozen and will not move anymore!
It's exactly the same deal with Nendoroid and Figma joints.
In fact, here's an old Nendoroid joint which has been taken apart, so you can get an idea of how it works:

The hole in one piece fits over the central peg in the other. This allows
the two pieces to rotate around each other – simple, but very effective!
Many joints are constructed this way.

Here is the ankle after drilling:

If the end of the peg is really mushy after drilling, just neaten it up a bit
with pliers and a craft knife/wire cutters so that the joint will fit
together nicely when gluing... this picture was taken after neatening.

Notice how the hole is slightly to one side in the above photograph. This is to correspond with the fact that the hole in the foot is also off-centre. If you can't get this quite right, it's no big deal, but it's better this way.
... Actually, to be honest, I was hoping to pull the peg out of the leg part before drilling to make it less awkward to get to, but the pliers didn't grip properly and I just ended up mashing the peg :/

Of course, this method is not limited to this kind of joint. You can use it to fix all sorts of things, like this fracture, in the straight shaft attaching RAH Roy Mustang's neck to his body:

This was successfully fixed by drilling and pinning
and Roy has since been posed many times over.

Anyway...
Now that the holes have been drilled, it's time to cut a piece of wire to fit them.
The length of the wire should be equal to the combined depths of the drilled holes.
For example, if I drilled a hole 3mm deep in the ankle and 4mm deep in the foot, then the wire will have to be 7mm long so the whole joint fits together nice and snugly.
It is advisable to cut your wire to the right length before gluing anything. Believe me, it's just easier that way.

Once you've cut your wire, glue it into one part of the drilled joint and let it set for a few hours.

Kanata's foot with the wire glued in. The bent wire in the foreground
was used to spread the glue.

Now that the glue is at least partially set, apply more glue and glue the whole joint together... with glue (I really love glue, don't you?).

This is how the joint looks now that it has been put back
together – it looks a bit messy close up, but from a normal
distance you don't notice it much.
It's certainly better than having no foot!

Figma Chie has come to look at Kanata's foot while the glue is drying.
She makes a pertinent (if dry) observation.

Now wait for the glue to dry. I don't know how long this will take. It depends on the type of glue, the temperature, atmospheric conditions, alignment of the planets, etc...
Make an educated guess based on the instructions on the packet and add a few hours. That's my advice.
...
   ...
      ...
OK, so the glue is now set and... did it work?

Heh. Sorry about the lighting... I think a cloud must have come across
when I shot some of the frames...

Yep.

And that's Method No.2.

Well, that's all from me!
I hope this helps some of you guys with your Figma-related problems!
Cheers! Sparkey.

Fixing the Central Torso Joint of a 12 Inch action Figure

Hello, all!
Gees, it's been ages since I posted here!
But that is for the simple reason that I have miraculously not broken any of my figures for that entire time (not even Roy)!
... until a couple of weeks ago...

I was playing around with RAH Captain Harlock (the more recent version, not the super old one) when suddenly something went "crack". It's the kind of sound you never want to hear any kind of action figure making, let alone your pricey discontinued 12-incher.
Captain Harlock is now fixed, but I spent, like, an hour getting him into a really cool pose (you know how it is) so for the duration of this blog, I will be using a different model.
Meet RAH Ginko.
He looks a bit apathetic, but he's actually a really helpful chap, and today he's kindly agreed to be an example RAH body for us.

Although the captain didn't seem visibly broken at first, as I continued trying to pose him, the joint in the middle of his torso became mysteriously limp, meaning he was unable to stand straight and, on further inspection, his entire top half could now be removed from his legs (which really isn't normal).

The problem joint, circled in blue.

A normal, upright pose.

When broken, Captain Harlock could
only slump forward like this.

One of the few photos I took during the
captain's operation.

Ouch.
Now, RAHs are complicated things, and I have to admit that what actually broke is still a mystery to me. I couldn't see any obvious breaks, and if anything fell out without me noticing, it must have been practically microscopic, because I searched all around the floor afterwards and I couldn't find anything.
Still, based on a theory I developed after several blunders, I managed to fix the cap'n.
So, the first thing I did after I broke Harlock was take him apart to see if that would shed any light on the matter.
First thing's first, the screws needed to come out.
RAH screws are nicely hidden under little round bits of plastic, but these can (usually) be easily removed with a pointy thing like a very small screwdriver or a knife.

Observe the five covered screws in Ginko's back.

I decided to undo the upper torso part first, since that was where I thought the break had occurred, but after fiddling around with several confusing pieces I realised that, in fact, it was the lower torso which had broken (the tipoff was when I realised that the body was no longer connected at the waist).
I then went to unscrew the screws in the lower torso, but Medicom has for no apparent reason filled the screw-heads in with some sort of paste which is extremely hard and resistant to several very good solvents, so I couldn't take apart the lower torso and had to peer in the hole at the bottom of it instead.
What I saw was a... spring.
A spring?
It seems to be part of a suspension system which gives RAHs their solid feeling whilst also having that awesomely flexible mid-torso joint... I think.
To explain better, here is a diagram of what roughly I think is inside the lower torso of a RAH body, based on what I could see:

The yellow thing at the top is part of the mid-torso joint.
It runs along tracks in the upper-torso part, allowing the torso to bend
back and forth. The yellow thing is held down by the spring (green),
which is, in turn, held down by the central peg attached to the legs (black).
The red thing can move up and down in the central shaft (blue). When the spring
is not held down, the red thing can move more freely, the yellow thing becomes
lax, and the torso becomes loose and slumps forward.
I hope you could follow that... it's hurting my brain trying to think back.
The grey blob is where I couldn't see. Sorry for the crappy drawing.

The spring seems to regulate the stiffness of the central torso joint.
The tension on the spring, in turn, is regulated by the vertical position of the sticky-outy bit on the central peg (black) within the spring coils.
When the tension on the spring is wrong, the figure slumps.
I think it is the theoretically existent sticky-outy bit which broke off, because there was no such thing visible by the time I took Captain Harlock apart and such a thing would be needed to make sense of the mechanism I could see inside the lower torso.
It would also have to be extremely small, which could explain why I couldn't find anything which could have broken.

A closeup of the broken peg (and the top of the captain's trousers);
if you look carefully, there's a smudgy area on the front of the peg
where something could have broken off.
Click on the image to enlarge it.

So to fix it: I drilled a hole into the central peg on the smudge and pushed a tiny itty bitty short piece of wire into the hole, making a new sticky-outy bit.

I drilled the hole using a pin vice, which
I finally got around to buying.
Use a drill bit the same width as your wire,
or as close as possible.
The wire I use has a 1.25mm diameter.

I then put the torso on backwards (you have to put it on backwards because that's the only place there's a gap for the sticky-outy thing to fit through) and turned it around fully several times as if I was screwing on the lid of a jar. Something made a satisfying noise and suddenly, miraculously, Captain Harlock was back to normal.
I didn't even glue the bit of wire in, because I was just testing a theory, but once fixed, he didn't want to come apart again, so I just left him that way. (That's why there are no photos of the fixed part or the underneath of the torso.)
Anyway, so yeah. Captain Harlock is fixed and I hope that made some kind of sense and wasn't too confusing. Even I am still a little confused.
If you have the same problem as I had and something here doesn't make sense, please feel free to email me for clarification: sparkeydavis@yahoo.com

well! My post is at an end!
As always, good luck with your repairs!
Cheers! Sparkey