A HYW plastic cavalry set has been promised for a couple of years now, but no sign of it as yet.
If you can’t wait, then actually chopping off the torsos from the legs of Perry plastic figures is not that difficult. You need a sharp and fairly heavy knife and a solid surface to cut on. Something like a Stanley knife is ideal. The best way is to first cut all around the waist, or wherever you want the joint to be...
Tricky with the HYW knightly figures, because often they have a low, hip-slung baldric, so cutting at the waist and attaching a HYW top half to a WOTR bottom half isn’t going to give the result you’re looking for. You’re going to end up with a section of late period plate armour underneath an earlier period top half... so it maybe better just to cut the riding legs of the WOTR MMAA or light cavalry, and stitch them onto HYW torsos and hips. (Although that might be a problem if the hips are not wide enough to seat the legs properly across the saddle...)
Anyway, back to the basic principle of a cut-and-shut at the waist... cut all the way round the torso with a sharp craft knife to avoid the cut splitting in an unwonted way - which tends to occur if you just chop straight through without this ‘pre-cut’. Then use the heavy knife to chop right through.
The plastic is soft, but at its thickest point like this, it can be quite tough and resistant to get through.
You’ll find a rocking motion with the knife will help you get through it.
Don’t worry too much about a clean cut. You can always shave more plastic off afterwards, and when you put the two new halves together, a slathering of liquid poly cement will conceal a multitude of sins...
Point to note. The thickness of the cut means you will almost certainly lose a portion of the plastic, meaning you are extremely unlikely to get two usable halves from one figure.
You can either get a usable perfect top half or a usable perfect bottom half, but some plastic will get lost along the way so something has to be sacrificed. This would be even more noticeable if you decided to try to saw the cut rather than just chop through. The upshot is that you need to cut slightly above or slightly below where you want thejoint to occur in the final figure, depending on whether you are prioritizing keeping the top half or the bottom half fully intact. If you literally cut in the middle, you’ll end up with neither half fully intact...
Anyway, this is just based on my experience of doing quite a few major surgeries of this type. It may be that others have more precise or sophisticated techniques. I’m a committed bodger when it comes to these things - or modelling in general in fact. Make the cut, stick things together, then make them good afterwards
October 12, 2011, 04:28:52 PM
