Custom Glyos Figures – Duplicating Parts

 Last month (possibly even the month before), I got the idea in my head of taking some of my Glyos system compatible figures, making molds of all the different interchangeable parts, and recasting a bunch of my own figures in a variety of different colors. This also has a lot of potential for custom sculpts and paint jobs as well while leaving my original Glyos figures intact and unaltered. Note that these custom Glyos figures aren’t anything that I plan to sell, I just think it would be a fun project to create a small army of my own custom Glyos figures in the style of the ones that I already own. Plus, I think a series of articles detailing the process of creating custom Glyos figures would be an equally fun ongoing series to write for the blog.

And if you don’t know what Glyos figures are, I recommend reading up on them here. They’re basically a line of smaller scale action figures with interchangeable parts that are produced by the original creators, Onell Design, as well as a bunch of other companies that use the same peg system of articulation.

I’ll be using these two figures as the basis for my initial set of Glyos molds, the Red Gunner Commando and the Glow Slasher from Rocom Toys’s Mighty Maniax line of 3-inch figures.

I started out by separating all the parts with socket holes in them (where the Glyos system pegs are inserted to give the figures their articulation) and prefilling the sockets with a little bit of silicone. This is a necessary step that needs to be done prior to pouring the proper silicone mold for each individual part, largely due to the unconventional hamburger-like shape of the Glyos system peg. It’s also an incredibly time consuming step, since a lot of parts like the torsos and crotch pieces have socket holes on more than one side. So the move is to prop the part up with Monster Clay so one of the sockets are facing upward (in order to let gravity do its work on the liquid silicone and allow it to fully flow into the socket), let the silicone pre-fill cure, then reorient the part so the next socket is facing upward, pre-fill, and repeat until every socket is pre-filled.

It’s here where I can see the value of a faster curing tin cure silicone like Oomoo 25 from Smoothcast to save all the waiting around, but here I was using a brand of cheaper, low-viscosity, platinum cure silicone that I purchased by the gallon on Amazon that I was using for a bunch of other projects as well. For comparison, Oomoo 25 has about a 75 minute cure time compared to the silicone I was using here, which had about a 16-24 hour cure time.

Once all the parts with sockets in them were pre-filled, I had to make sure that the pre-filled areas would fuse with the fresh silicone that I would eventually pour around them when it came time to make the actual molds. So to prevent any potential delamination, I took some cotton swabs and dampened them with isopropyl alcohol and cleaned each of the pre-filled areas and cleaned them again with a swab that was dipped in purified water. This isn’t normally an issue with higher quality brands of silicone like Cast-A-Mold 25T from Specialty Resin and Chemical but for this Amazon stuff, I didn’t want to take any chances.

After adding the necessary air vents and pour spots (which I unfortunately didn’t get a picture of), I used some small beer pong cups to act as the mold surrounds before filling them with more of the same silicone that I used to pre-fill the sockets. I don’t recommend intermixing different brands of silicone in a single mold, even if both of the silicones are platinum cured and have similar properties.

The parts themselves are tiny and thus don’t require a lot of silicone to mold, which is a big reason why I decided to give this project a shot.

Once the molds were fully cured, I cut them open to extract the original parts, and seasoned the molds with my initial batch of castings made with FlexIt 90 flexible resin. The recasted parts are in brown and pictured below is me test fitting them onto the original parts (in glow-in-the-dark white and red, respectively). I know I’ve said this before, but for FlexIt 90 and any other kind of flexible resin, it’s best to wait overnight or 24 hours for the castings to reach their full 90A shore hardness before trying to connect them with any mating joints or sockets. If you attempt to do this while the resin is still relatively soft, you run the risk of either warping the socket or having the peg or balljoint twist off inside of the socket when you attempt to rotate the part. So give the resin time to set up long after its stated cure time (for FlexIt 90, it’s 90 minutes, when it’s safe to demold but not completely safe to assemble with something else).

Here’s another original vs recasts comparison, with the originals in red and the recasts in black.

And one more test fitting pic for good measure as I continued to experiment with the molds and create different recast batches in different pigment colors. The recasts here are in tan/flesh tone (as well as black).

Satisfied with my results for the molds of the socketed parts, I moved on to casting the parts that had no sockets which was a simpler process by comparison. These non-socketed parts consisted of the arms, legs, and heads which had the Glyos pegs on one or more ends. Like most every mold I make, I first needed to prep the original master parts by adding a pour spout (funnels left behind from previous resin castings that I save in a candy tin for future molds) and air vents consisting of wooden toothpicks and skewers. I actually remembered to take a photograph this time. These were the Glow Slasher arms, but the venting scheme was very similar for all the parts with one or more Glyos pegs.

Once the mold preparations were complete, more cup molds were to follow. I’m not sure all the molds pictured here were for this particular project. I honestly don’t remember.

And that’s the whole process. 

My first real casting effort with these molds was to make a custom Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees (particularly as he appears in Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter) using the Glow Slasher heads and limbs with the Gunner Commando’s boots. Again, these are composed entirely of recasted parts from the molds I created in this article. The plastic colors were my first experiment with pre-mixing resin dyes to match a color that I wanted to emulate, preparing the dyes for things like Jason’s shirt color, skin tone, pants color, Michael’s boiler suit, etc in some tiny craft containers that I got from the Dollar Tree (the same type of tiny containers that I also used for the isopropyl alcohol and purified water seen in the cleaning stage).

My typical process for dying resin is to squirt the pigment straight from the bottles into Part B of my two-part resin and then stirring it before adding Part A and then stirring that. But due to the extremely limited working time of FlexIt 90 resin (3 minutes, with at least one of those minutes devoted to getting the molds into my pressure pot, securing its lid and getting it up to pressure) and the fact that I wanted to get these colors as accurate as possible, I would instead separately mix just the pigments in the little plastic containers and seal them with the lid so they wouldn’t dry out. When it came time to actually cast the molds, I would scoop out some of the pre-mixed pigment with a wooden craft stick and add it to Part B of the resin.

I will be adding paint applications to these figures as well as probably making a different Jason head that is more accurate to the character than the default one I duplicated from the Glow Slasher figure. But those customs will be in their own separate article once I actually get around to finishing them, so be on the lookout for that in the near future. For this article, I just wanted to highlight the molding and casting process involved in creating your own Glyos figures and the individual customization projects are a separate process in and of themselves.

I think it would also be fun to make more variations of Jason, like the blue 8-bit NES version of the character as well as the Roy Burns imposter Jason from Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. But I’ll try not to get ahead of myself…