Random Resin Recasts - Part 2

I’ll try not to drone on as long as I did in the first Random Resin Recasts article but if this is YOUR first Random Resin Recasts, I’ll briefly explain what I do here. I basically just take random figures from my bits bin and/or my personal collection, make a mold of it using either Composimold or my DIY gelatin-glycerin reusable molding compound, extract the master from the mold, fill the mold with resin, and see how they cast.

First up are two mini vinyl Transformers figures (about 1.25” tall each) of Starscream and Megatron that used to be sold at the Dollar Tree a few years back. The one pictured here was a two-part mold made with Composimold but I made a second mold of these same figures using a “hybrid” two-part mold that was one half Composimold and one half ImPressive Putty.

The results were…not great. The purple Megatron was the only one that came out kind of good, but I would encounter really rough, bumpy, generally awful finishes and loads of nigh-unsandable flashing with the rest. This would be a common problem I’d often encounter with Composimold and, to a lesser extent, my DIY molding compound as well that I’m going to chalk up as a combination of going too long without cleaning my mold materials (i.e. heating it up and pouring it through a mesh strainer to sift out all the chunks of resin, dirt, and pieces of tooth pick/wood skewers) and pouring it too fast into the mold containers instead of pouring it as a slow, thin stream to reduce air bubbles.

I kept the purple Megatron for later repainting/customizing and tossed the rest out. I've had way more hits than missed with these resin casting experiments, but I've long made peace with the fact that they can't all be winners.

The next piece was a Super7 MUSCLE figure from their Legends of Lucha Libre line. I think this is El Solar. Here he is after being extracted from his mold that I made using my DIY gelatin-glycerin compound.

And it came out quite well aside from a slightly messed up right hand (which you can’t really see here). I have a bunch of Super7 MUSCLE minis, most of them from their Robotech MUSCLE line, that I’d like to make resin duplicates of in addition to trying this one again (as well as the two other luchadores that came with it). Eventually. These things seem like they would be really fun to customize but that’s a project for another day.

And speaking of projects for another day, I picked up this Roblox Cyborg Knight action figure on clearance. Not because I’ve a fan of Roblox, in fact, I don’t really know much about it aside from the fact that it’s a game that’s popular with really little kids. And that there are apparently cyborg knights in it. I mostly bought it because it looks cool and I thought that maybe turn it into a custom Dark Souls figure since it bears a slight resemblance to Oscar of Astora/the Elite Knight armor set (which was one of my favorite looks in the trilogy next to the gold-hemmed black robes).

I’d still like to do that down the road, but what I really wanted to do in that moment was to make a mold of the figure with my gelatin-glycerin material.

I cast it with the same batch of clear, undyed epoxy resin as my El Solar MUSCLE figure and I was happy with how it came out aside from a few air bubbles on and around his chin and the lower part of his tunic, which I didn’t have high hopes for given the fact that I only really made air vents for his hands (this was just a quickie mold, after all). I’ll probably turn it into a “statue”/staction figure of my Chosen Undead player character wearing the Elite Knight armor from the first or second Dark Souls game. Just another thing to add on my massive, ever-growing list of projects.

I reached deep into my bottomless bin of customization fodder and pulled out this little Leonard from TMNT 2012. I’m guessing this is from a line of Fisher-Price Imaginext toys made with the TMNT license but what I know for sure is that it came in a one of those $1 Goodwill grab bags. The Power Ranger figure that I cast later on this article came from the same grab bag, if I’m remembering things correctly. In any event, I also made a basic mold of this figure using my DIY gelatin-glycerin material.

The first copy I cast in resin dyed transparent white, since I eventually want to make an homage to the wonderfully bizarre “Albino Leo” bootleg figure that was made infamous by Phelan Porteous’s Bootleg Zones video about the Turtles Fighters/Galapagos Guerreros line of TMNT knock-offs.

And while I was thinking about that video, I decide to use the same mold to make a “Monster Mike” to go with my Albino Leo. I cast this one in resin that was colored with a green dye, but it doesn’t really matter since I’m going to be doing a full repaint on both these. I just have about two dozen different color resin dyes that came in a $6 set I found in an Amazon sale and it’s fun trying out each and every of them.

The next casting is a Beastman figure from the 2002 incarnation of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. I got this in an ebay action figure lot quite some time ago and I was surprised to elarn that this was actually a McDonald’s toy. It’s crazy to think about, because it’s about 5.5” tall, it looks great, and the sculpting is on point. Between inflation and all the price hikes over the course of the last 20 years, I can easily see a toy of this quality being sold for $10-15 on current year retail shelves. But I digress.

I decided to go with another “clay up” mold for this one. I covered the back half with non-hardening clay, stuffed it into a sealed deli container, cut a hole in the front of the container, and pourned in the first layer of Composimold. When the first layer had hardened, I removed the clay and repeated the process for the other side. Here’s the finished mold and yes, I am holding it open with my big toe. And no, it wasn't the most comfortable position to be taking a photo in but somehow I managed.

Due to its unconventional body shape, I didn’t have high hopes for this casting either (but it was a lot of fun to try). It wasn’t a total disaster, but the bottom half of the head, one of its hands, and one of its feet didn’t come out. At all.

But it’s nothing I couldn’t fix in post. I pressed the original figure’s head, hand, and foot in ImPressive Putty to make three separate mini molds, cast those in resin, and then glued them onto the recast to make Beastman whole once again. I’m thinking of painting it up like the Great Guardian Ape from the game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice for a weird MOTUxSekiro crossover project.

Here’s my casting (dyed with transparent white resin colorant) side by side with the original figure:

While I was at it, I also took the He-Man figure from that same set of McDonald’s toys and decided to make a resin duplicate of that one too. It actually came out much better than the Beastman one but I still have a problem with half its head going missing.

Something I noticed about these 200X He-Man figures is that, even in the one full-sized figure I own from this line (Jungle Attack He-Man, if you were wondering) is that they all have these bizarrely positioned head. Like their necks are full extended and they’re all staring at the ground like a dejected teenager who was just grounded by their parents. Doesn’t make for easy resin castings but whenever I figure out what I’m going to do with this McDonald’s He-Man figure, I’ll just cast him a new head like I did for the McDonald’s Beastman.

Here’s that Power Ranger I mentioned earlier that came from the same Goodwill grab bag as the Imaginex Ninja Turtle. Given its simple design and limited articulation, I figured it would be an easy mold to make.

While I loved the original Mighty Morphing Power Rangers show when I was four years old but unlike other IPs that I was a fan of (Transformers, G.I. Joe, He-Man, Thundercats, Robotech, Voltron, Speed Racer, etc), I can’t say it’s one of those things that I really paid much attention to or felt any kind of nostalgia for when I got older. The same can be said for the Ninja Turtles.

I cast the Power Ranger in the same batch of transparent purple resin that I used for the McDonald’s He-Man and the mini Megatron molds. The result was pretty good, though like a lot of figures I cast around this time, I had a little bit of trouble with air bubbles getting caught (and subsequently destroying) the chin. Again, like the He-Man, I’ll make him a new head whenever I figure out what I want to do with this casting.

Still, it’s nice to look at. He’s like an effervescent grape soda man.

But enough about that. It’s time for the main event! And like the last Random Resin Recast and its predecessor article, I’m going to use every drop of my DIY mold making material (I think I actually had to whip up a THIRD batch of the stuff for this guy) to mold something really, really big.

Since I had a Titan Warriors Starstream figure from the same series as the Optimus Prime PVC figure that I recasted, that’s what I decided to go with here. Much like Optimus, Starscream has the potential for a ton of fun variants that I can customize him in so I was really excited to give this a shot.

Since the Starscream was a little bit bigger than the Optimus Prime, I ended up having to stack to deli containers on top of one another to make his moldbox. I sealed the gap between them with either Loctite or Gorilla brand silicone sealant and taped up the containers to make extra sure there wouldn’t be any leaks.

And here is the original figure, freed from his gelatin and glycerin prison.

I cast the first mold in resin dyed light blue. It isn’t perfect but I wasn’t expecting it to be. There’s quite a few air bubbles but overall, nothing I can fix up with some heavy sanding and some Mr. Surfacer hobby paint (though I did eventually cast him a new face, once again pressing the original’s face into ImPressive Putty to create a one-part mold of just that part).

As I alluded to in the previous Random Resin Recasts, I’m still very much leaning towards painting this up as a G2 Jungle Attack Starscream.

The second casting didn’t come out quite as well. In fact, it was downright awful. Like the small Transformers from earlier in this article, it too suffered from the same rough, bumpy finish. I probably can’t do much with one in terms of giving it a custom deco, but I do have plans to saw off the limbs and fix them up with some doll articulation joints I bought on Amazon, so stay tuned for that Crafting Experiment article (if it actually works or produces anything worth writing about).

So that’s Random Resin Recasts Part 2. I’ve taken enough pictures and made enough castings for at least two more installments, so expect to see the results of those very soon.