Shop Log - 9/21/22

Oof, I really don’t like going this long without updating the oId hobby blog but it’s better late than never, I suppose. I’ve had some trouble focusing on one thing these last few months and September has been especially bad. As far as where I’ve been, I spent the first week (and change) of the month visiting family in Ohio and I’ve more or less take a short break from crafting so as not to burn myself out from overwork for the second (or possibly even the third) time this year. And while I haven’t been working like a dog on any one thing on my perpetually growing mountain of projects since then, I have been working on a lot of different things in miniscule chunks. Here’s just a few of them.

But before I get into those, I did make a tiny bit of progress on my ongoing Mr. Boneface project. I’ve come to think of this as a more long-term project, since every new challenge I encounter with what I had envisioned for the Mr. Boneface series of action figures has made it less and less of the quick turnaround project that I’d initially intended it to be. It turns out that making action figures is very hard and incredibly time consuming. Whodathunk it?

I did, however, make some thermoplastic “foundations” out of worbla for two of the wearable accessories. I wanted to ensure that the wearable accessories conformed to the shape of the figure in the way that my previous attempts at these failed, so I used some of my cast-off figures (using the same Buck body as my Mr. Boneface figures) as mannequins while I heated up the worbla. The plan here is to sculpt the details on top of these worbla foundations. We’ll see how that goes.

And speaking of my MOTU bootleg buck molds, I felt the unexplained urge to use those very same molds to cast a He-Man and Skeletor in semi-translucent, glitter infused green and pink (respectively). I like the gummy candy look of these figures and the people I’ve shown them to seem to like them as well. I want to gauge whether or not there would be an audience for these things, just simple translucent “gummy” figures with no fancy header card (packaged in a simple poly bag), one accessory, and possibly two interchangeable heads as smaller ticket item for me to get out there while I continue working on my more involved projects like the Mr. Boneface series and my other, more original sculpt-heavy designs that I’ve been picking away at (like the one I’m about to unveil).

I guess you can think of the remainder of this Shop Log as a kind of preview of coming attractions, as I would ideally like each of these projects to be their own separate article when I’m done (whenever that may be). I’ll start off with what is probably my most ambitious (and ridiculous) one to date: an articulated Mechaburger action figure heavily inspired the fake mascot from Saints Row 2022. Personal feelings about this game aside, I love the design of this guy and his G1 Transformers energy (plus, it doesn't hurt that he looks so reminiscent of Mirage and Sideswipe, two of my favorites). Here’s a screenshot I took for reference.

I haven’t made a TON of progress on this beyond some initial conceptualization, though I did make a urethane resin copy of these legs and arms from a 6” Optimus Prime PVC figure to serve as foundation for which to build upon. While I’m still very much in the initial planning and mock-up stages, I envision the final product to be derived from a mix of heavily modified kitbashed parts and original sculpts.

I started sanding down and trimming off the more recognizable details and added a ball joint to the waist, one taken from another one of my cast-off figures made using my aforementioned MOTU bootleg molds. I took the neck joint from an extra urethane casting that once belonged to a torso mold from that same set (that’s the smaller white ball joint you see in the pic). I was about to use the arm joints from that same buck body as well, but since this figure (if I indeed decide to stick with a 6” scale version of this idea) will have arms that are quite a bit bigger than my MOTU bootlegs, I thought it might be better if I nick the arm joints from a larger figure as well.

Luckily, I had some an extra pair of arms that I duplicated from an actual He-Man figure (instead of the typical knock-off Combo Hero/MOTU bootleg buck that you’re used to seeing me use) from a different project that I’ll be talking about later on. I laid out next to the robot arms and took some measurements with my caliper as I tried to get a sense of not just the position of where to put the socket holes where the ball joints will go on said robot arms but also the depth of the sockets.

For the ball joints themselves, I tried molding them using ImPressive Putty that I formed around the joints on a vintage He-Man figure that I was working on and while that worked okay just to have some joints on hand for dry-fitting various pieces to my conceptual/rough sculpts, I’m not happy with the consistency of the castings made from ImPressive Putty. I’ll probably end up just making a proper mold of an entire vintage MOTU torso, taking the joints directly from castings made from that, and then probably making smaller molds of just the ball joints themselves. Plus, I’ll probably have use for a vintage MOTU torso mold for future projects (especially as I begin working more with Monster Clay to modify existing sculpts) as I already have molds that I made for vintage MOTU arms and several different heads in my mold library.

I also made a rough sculpt of Mechaburger’s torso out of polymer clay, mostly for fun and practice, but also to get a sense of the overall proportions and help me to visualize how and where to position the articulation joints when I start sculpting this project for real. Like I said earlier, this will be a very involved, long-term creative project and I haven’t truly started to delve into it quite yet. But much like my ongoing Mr. Boneface project, I suspect this one will also teach me a lot about the toy making process when it’s all said and done.

I have no shortage of shorter term, one-off side projects as well. Like this vintage MOTU Prince Adam beater figure that I got on eBay for a few bucks. It had no arms and a half chewed off nose, so I figure that it might be a fun challenge to mold and cast it a new head and a pair of arms in Flex It 90. Its repro parts I temporarily borrowed from other figures in my collection, particularly a Battle Armor He-Man for the head and a Man-At-Arms figure for the arms. Again, I’ll go into that whole process when I finish this project up and give it is own article.

After giving the figure its replacement head and arms, I decided to give it a new paint job as well and redeco it as my own custom version of Wonderbread He-Man aka WunDar. I already made a custom Dollar Tree miniature figurine of that character quite some time ago but I want to go one step further with this project. For now, I started painting this custom’s basecoat and I’m liking where things are headed so far. After I finishing painting him, I plan to give him his classic maroon-colored weapons and black Zodak armor, which I also have mostly done and will elaborate on more in this project’s stand alone article.

I’ve also been messing around with some new sculpting mediums, continuing to dabble with Monster Clay now that I finally have a crockpot to more effectively melt the stuff. Here’s some more examples of me pouring liquefied Monster Clay into some existing silicone molds and letting it harden. I still haven’t gotten the chance to actually try sculpting with Monster Clay, but the way this stuff holds its shape is really amazing to me considering how easy it is to manipulate and smooth over certain details with just a little bit of heat applied.

I also bought (and have since expended) a little trial packet of CosClay, as the idea of a polymer clay that remains flexible after you bake it was intrigued me after I saw the Crafsman’s video on the material. Here’s a He-Man harness that I pressed into some Oyumaru thermoplastic and attempted to duplicate with CosClay before attaching it to a resin copy of my standard MOTU bootleg torso.

As you may recall from previous Shop Logs, I’ve deemed making removable MOTU/MOTU-inspired armor for action figures to be pretty much impossible (at least for me, anyways) so going forward, if I want a figure to have armor, I’ll be sculpting it (or copying it) directly onto the torso like pretty much every other kind of action figure you’ll come across that isn’t MOTU. Due to CosClay’s flexible properties, I figured it might be a viable option to mold in the shape of the armor, bake it until its cured, and then permanently attach it to the torso prior to making the mold.

That’s what the point of this little exercise was, though I’m leaning more towards doing this same process with Monster Clay as it’s easily more cost effective in the long run. CosClay is still pretty neat though and it’s what I used to make a rough copy of the Zodak armor that I’ll be using for my above-mentioned Wonderbread He-Man custom. I might work with stuff more in the future and I might not.

To cap off this Shop Log, I recently purchased a gallon of the cheapest silicone rubber I could find on Amazon because I wanted to make molds of some seemingly random stuff that I had lying around (namely a M.A.R.S. robot toy with interchangeable parts, a Mexican bootleg Lion-O, and a 3D printed Perseus figure from Clash of the Titans that I got on ebay, and a random yardsale Power Ranger that isn’t pictured here). I bought a gallon of the cheap, crappy Startso World stuff because I didn’t want to dip into the last remaining gallon of my good Cast-A-Mold 25T silicone, since I’m saving that for my more serious projects (insofar as making your own bootleg toys can be considered serious). These are just things I’m messing around and experimenting with because I thought they might make decent buck systems for smaller scale figures.

I made some funnels/pour spouts out of some leftover polymer clay and in the pic below, I glued them and the air vents to all these random parts. For more details on how I set up my parts before I mold them, check out my article on how I make my one-part silicone rubber cut molds.

Until then, stay tuned for more updates. I hope my next post isn’t as embarrassingly delayed as this one.