Basic Training

From JCWiki

Welcome to Basic Training. This is JoeCustoms.com's version of Customizing 101. Anybody, whether you've ever customized, frankensteined, kitbashed, or painted a figure before in your life or not will be able to jump in and try out some of these techniques. Watch the videos and give them a try. We'll try to add to these on a quarterly basis.

Head Swaps

One of the first kinds of customizing anybody does is part swapping. Take a part from figure A and put it on figure B. The easiest place to start is with the heads of the Rise of Cobra/25th Anniversary figures. While this might not be the most time consuming level of customizing, with a good eye for parts you can make some really cool looking figures.

Modern figures

Shippy

Wolvie

The most unstoppable force evah!

Merc with a Mouth

Using Hot Glue to make heads fit better

A head swap after adding some hot glue for a tighter fit.

The Fridge

Hollowing out heads to fit on 25th/RoC figures

After the previous videos were shown, some people asked how to make an RAH head work with a 25th style figure.

O-ring construction figures

For the old school customizers part swapping is still pretty simple. All you need is a screwdriver, possibly a fresh o-ring, and some parts to swap. We'll stick with the head switch-a-roo for right now.

Boil and Pop

Boil and Pop is the customizing term used to describe the softening of plastic joints by inserting a figure into boiling water and then popping or pulling the parts out of the socket. It is essentially another way to do some part swapping for a figure.

You will need some parts to swap and a way to boil water. While I used a microwave and a bowl, you could also use a stove top and pot.

*WARNING*

Per SNAKE - If you boil water in your microwave be careful and maybe throw a chopstick or something in it, cause a microwave can cause water to boil without bubbles and that can lead to almost an explosion of hot water when you drop something in it.

Spray painting

Spray painting is great to give a base coat, tends to put up with wear and tare better then most other paints, and essentially the same technique can be applied to a spray on protective clear coating.