Shop Log – 8/24/22

I started out this week in crafting with a fresh (and festive) new plastic mat for my casting corner. The old one was so weighed down with cured resin that it felt like it weighed 25 pounds.

Progress on the Mr. Boneface series is continuing to trundle along. Despite what I said in a previous Shop Log, I did end up casting all the figures’ base stands in rigid urethane resin (Specialty Resin and Chemical’s Model Pro Slow) because there’s no way to really do these in lightweight Flex-It 90 resin unless I retooled the bases for a third time to be even thicker (and even that isn’t a guarantee) and yeah, I was beyond sick of messing with them at this point. This is probably the last time I’ll ever include bases with a figure I plan to sell, even if that means retooling (heck, re-engineering) the action figure’s feet and legs to better compensate for the weight and balance issues that arise from the figures being cast in a lighter weight resin. I’ve done it before with my prototype werewolf figure, I’ll figure it out again for the basic MOTU KO legs.

I do still need to dremel off all the flashing and clean them up, but unlike parts cast in Flex-It 90, at least I can actually sand these.

Speaking of things that I will never do again after the Mr. Boneface project is done, I continued the trial and error phase in creating wearable accessories for the figures. I took some of the patterns that I printed out in my last Shop Log and cut them out of some polymer clay. Here is the shoulder pauldron and the cowl accessories. Note that these aren’t meant to be the final patterns, this is just a test to see how they’ll fit on a figure and what I need to tweak going forward.

After baking the polymer clay, I pressed it into ImPressive putty to create some quick and dirty open-face molds for which I can pour in some Flex-It 40 super-flexible (and super soft) resin. Again, not as a final piece or anything, just to test out the material. And how did it turn out once I poured the Flex-It 40 into the molds, popped them into my pressure pot, and test-fitted it onto a figure?

Not very well. I knew ahead of time that the parts would be much thicker than the polymer clay masters since that always tends to happen whenever I put something like this in ImPressive putty, but what was really disappointing is how the wearable accessories didn’t conform to or drape over the figure like I had initially hoped given the almost weightless feeling of the material. I had my fingers crossed that the cowl in particular wouldn’t stick up like in the picture, but that’s exactly what happened. Boo.

I didn’t take pictures of the pauldron but, unlike my initial impressions when I test-fitted a paper version, they ended up looking way too big and had the exact same issue as the cowl pictured below. Another major fail.

I guess it’s back to the drawing board for the wearable accessories once again, further reaffirming my decision to completely ditch wearable accessories in future releases after the Mr. Boneface wave of figures and just sculpt armor and other clothing-related details onto the figure itself. Yeah, that means having to make new molds of the torsos and legs and other major parts, but that’s so much less of a pain than having to blindly bungle my way through…whatever this is.

“But Matt, why don’t you just transfix the straps and clasp-things from some of the pre-existing wearable accessories that you’ve duplicated in the past? Surely those will pull the cowl and other accessories taut against the figure!”

Yeeeeeah, that’s another functionality issue I’m having with creating wearable accessories. I think it's safe to admit that I was a bit too optimistic in my initial assessment of that one bandolier accessory I copied.

To further illustrate my pains with molding and casting wearable action figure accessories, take for instance this vintage He-Man harness that I wanted to replicate with a two-part silicone mold. This little side project doubled as an experiment, since this marked the first time using Monster Clay as the “bed” material for the first part of a two-part mold. At least that seemed to work out okay, but read on.

Once I completed the two-part silicone mold, injected it with Flex-It 40 resin once again, and test fitted it onto a figure (my yellow Blaster of the Universe prototype from last time), I encountered the same problem I’ve always encountered with these “straps n’ clasps” (to coin a term) based accessories. Not only do they not come out the mold well and require a great deal of microsurgery with my sharpest hobby knife, you’re lucky if the clasp doesn’t immediately break (like what happened in the picture below) or the end of the strap doesn’t tear off. If neither if these things happen, it’s only a matter of time before they do. I’ve cast wearable accessories like this He-Man harness in both Flex-It 40 and the stronger Flex-It 90 resin and it doesn’t make much of a different.

That’s why I’m not going to use a similar strap n’ clasp system on my Mr. Boneface figures. The quality just isn’t there. And yes, as I stated before, the Mr. Boneface series is my crash course in creating action figures, but I still want my initial wave of action figures to be as good as possible.

I have had some minor successes in molding and casting similar wearable action figures accessories, like this belt from a Galoob WCW figure that I’ve removed and put back on multiple times as yet another quality test, but it’s nothing I want to hang my hat on or plan to include in any current or future action figure projects.

Since I mentioned future projects, I made molds and rigid urethane castings of this torso and legs from a vintage 1980’s pirate figure that I randomly came across on Ebay. I saw that it was connected by simple ball joints (with some sockets for the feet on the underside of the legs) and figured it would make for a decent “fat guy” buck body where I could modify the legs and sculpt all new arms, feet, and heads.

One thing I want to do with this newly acquired fat guy buck is to make a highly stylized oni figure (oni are like ogres from Japanese mythology, if you didn’t know). That’s one of many character ideas that I have in mind for this body pattern. I think it would also look cool if I made the arms really oversized and slightly bent at the elbows like a scaled up version of the Eternia Minis line of figures. I hope to get started on this new type of figure soon after I’ve wrapped up the Mr. Boneface project.

I can’t end this Shop Log without at least teasing another side project. I do plan on giving it its own separate article when I’m done, this idea randomly came about when I was making urethane resin castings of some vintage toys. Particularly, a Galoob WCW figure of Lex Luger from 1990, a random MUSCLE figure, and some Toxie heads from my Toxic Crusader figure.

I’d initially made the two-part silicone mold of the Lex Luger to pour molten Monster Clay into because I thought it would make for a decent base to customize and sculpt over when I eventually start to work more with that material. And while I still plan on using the mold for that, I wanted to “season” said mold by making a urethane resin casting just to see how it would turn out.

That’s when inspiration struck and so began the journey of the Troma Package, Tox Luger.

But that’s where I’ll leave things for today.