Action Figure Customization: Commando X (Part 1 – The Build)

 I’ve been wanting to get into action figure customization for a few years now and with the progress I’ve made over the past year and a half with scratch-building and miniature painting, I figured it was time to put together what I’ve learned thus far and see what I could come up with. I went digging through my junk drawer and came out with a bag of cheapo bootleg toy soldiers (complete with massively oversized weapons and paint jobs that are even worse than mine) and another bag containing Iron Man parts (purchased for $1 at a yard sale) that are in more or less the same 3.75” scale as the soldiers. Given the parts I had at my disposal, I knew right off the bat that I was going with a cyborg super soldier theme.

Exactly what toy these Iron Man parts came from, I have no idea except that they appear to be part of a “build your own figure” set that allows for mixing and matching different arms and legs with different torsos based on a peg-system. As for what the cheapo soldiers might be ripping off, my best guess is that they’re a gross bastardization of the Corps line from Lanard Toys (the 5-POA/points of articulation versions, naturally). But I’ll leave that mystery to more learned bootleg archeologists than myself.

Sifting through this bag of treasures, I found not only the figure I’d use as a base but my inspiration for this custom as well. I picked this guy in particular because his head mold and the shades made me think of Captain Commando (or Duke Nukem, maybe). Digging through it again, I found the pair of robot arms that would replace his horrendously painted biological ones, with the larger of the two arms reminded me of a character another one of my all-time favorite side-scrolling beat-em-ups from the 90’s…Major Dutch Schaefer from Alien vs Predator! Major Dutch would serve as my primary inspiration for this figure going forward. This was also the point where I thought of a name for this cyborg soldier, Commando X. The “Commando” because of Captain Commando and the overall 90’s video game aesthetic I wanted and the “X” because of the generic toy soldiers from which he’s largely derived.

Being a cheapo toy, I unscrewed the two screws in his back using a screwdriver from an eyeglass repair kit and the entire thing came apart immediately. I swapped out his arms with his cybernetic replacements and put him back together for a test fitting and an initial round of sanding. There were noticeable gaps between his shoulders and the Iron Man arms, so I took a piece of plastic from my bits box (which may or may not have come from an old Spider-Man figure) and snipped it into two pieces, made them into shoulder pads, and glued them onto the arms with E6000. I glued them to the arms themselves rather than the torso because I wanted to retain as much arm articulation as I could and also because I knew I would be opening the torso back up to make some adjustments. More on that in a bit…

But first, a word about E6000 glue. I didn’t like it at first because of how long it takes to cure and how thick it comes out of the tube (even with the smallest applicator noses) but the bond is incredibly strong and on builds like this where I just did a little bit at a time and let it sit, it’s really great. It’s stronger and considerably less messy than sprinkling baking soda onto superglue (I suppose I could just use kicker or super glue accelerator for that, but I’m too cheap for that). But I digress.

I also added a piece of wire to an accessory hole in the bigger arm because I thought it looked cool. Afterwards, I wasn’t completely satisfied with the legs because I thought they were either too spindly for this bulky boi and because I didn’t like the details for this particular figure. The straps around the thighs screamed paratrooper and that’s not really the look I wanted here. So I found a leg donor in the bootleg bag (one of several faceless horrors that came with the set) and they were a perfect fit. Nice and snug, unlike the arms themselves which I would address next.

You can’t tell from the pictures, but the Iron Man arms were incredibly wobbly and would slide right out of the holes in the torso. So it was clear to me that I would need to put something around the arm pegs to increase the surface area and unwilling to put the time and effort into preparing some epoxy putty (all that mixing and waiting and sitting), I decided to heat up some water and go with the more expedient option. I’m talking about thermoplastic craft beads.

I’d initially purchased a bag of the stuff to try out in two-part molds I created with Oyumaru Blue Stuff (again, I still very much intend to write an article not only on Blue Stuff but also debating the merits of different clays/puttied like apoxie putty, milliput, and the aforementioned craft beads). You basically just let them sit in some hot water until the white beads turn clear, then mold it into shape and wait for it to dry (turning white again). Like Blue Stuff, you can melt it down and remold as much as you want. The clump I’m holding in the picture was a mass of leftover thermoplastic beads from when I was making copies of GI Joe stands for later projects. I only needed a little bit of it to put around the arm pegs, creating little makeshift caps that would make them a tighter fit inside of the torso.

After the thermoplastic caps dried, I slid them off, filled them with superglue (so they wouldn’t continue to slide off) and slipped them back onto the arm pegs. I refit them inside the torso and voila, it’s not pretty but it got the job done. The arms were no longer loose and still retained their rotational range of movement.

I put everything back together, did some more sanding, though I was a light touch around the face and head because I didn’t want to wreck any of the details. This would come back to bite me later on in the later painting stages when I vastly underestimated the cheapness of the plastic and the shoddiness of the mold in general (but more on that in Part 2). But after sanding, I hit him with a can of compressed air and washed the whole thing down first in water and dish soap and then isopropyl alcohol, both applied with an old toothbrush. After drying it out, I primed the figure in the usual Rustoleum Flat Gray acrylic primer.

So we’re good right? All ready to paint? Sadly, no. The adventure continues.

After leaving the primer to cure for a full day and a half, there were parts of the figure that still felt sticky. It wasn’t coming off onto my fingers or anything that severe, but it felt tacky to the touch and I wasn’t going to let that fly. See, I use the Rustoleum gray primer on all of my scratch building and kitbashing projects and this has never happened before (it’s only ever happened with a Krylon gray primer I used once) so I had to chalk it up to the cheapo plastics used on the figure. Much like the trouble with the arm joints, I once again had to improvise and after watching videos of a few potential solutions on Youtube, I decided to go with the baking soda method. Basically, it involved dunking the figure in baking soda and then blasting off the excess with compressed air.

I had to do this a couple times, because every time I tried to wash it off after letting the baking soda set, the stickiness would return (though considerably less sticky than before). I eventually got to the point where the stickiness was negated and no apparent signs of baking soda remained on the figure. And with that, I would proceed to painting in the days that followed.