Posted: 12 August 2008 at 7:05am | IP Logged | 5
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I stripped my second figurine (a Captain Mar-Vell) over the weekend in preparation for my second custom (the first is still a work-in-progress, but it's getting close to being done). I tried using Ryan Maxwell's method of using acetone (nail polish) to do the paint removal and it worked well -- much, much, MUCH faster than soaking a figure in Pine-Sol for a week; the paint came right off with minimal fuss.
I was pleased to see that the acetone did not damage the base, but the acetone did NOT do a great job of dissolving the adhesive that holds the figure's foot-pegs in place. Despite being careful and using tools to try to slowly pry the pegs out of the base, I still managed to break one of the feet off at the ankle (DOH!).
:-(
Thankfully, it was an easy fix -- I just grabbed the smallest drill bit I have, drilled into the leg and then drilled a matching hole into the broken foot, inserted some stainless steel floral wire that I have on-hand for making armatures, and superglued it all together (using some cheap "Crazy Glue" that I had on-hand). I'll need to mend the line where the break occurred, but I was planning to add boot cuffs to the figure anyway so that shouldn't be a problem.
I also discovered something else of interest about the Mar-Vell figurine that might be of interest to other customizers -- Mar-Vell's arms are cast as separate pieces and then epoxied into place before painting, which means that they can be easily removed at the elbow and re-positioned.
Looking at how it all goes together, it makes a lot of sense from a casting perspective -- the body and arms down to the elbows are all cast as one piece with "holes" just below the biceps where "posts" that are cast into the upraised forearms plug into, thus completing the figure.
This opens up a lot of neat possibilities for Mar-Vell as a custom base as it should be even easier to re-position his arms without the need to use a jeweler's saw to cut them off.
This is potentially going to make the custom that I'm working on even more unique, because if I decide to re-postion the arms the resultant custom won't look exactly like a Mar-Vell repaint.
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