Dioramas, Repair tips, Photography, and DIY/OOAK Thread

This place is for those who are brave enough to try their hands at making dioramas, repairing toys, or creating awesome customs! If you find cool tips of the trade online, or if you have repair suggestions, post them here!

Up first - I found an AWESOME and easy looking tutorial on how to make a dais/throne for 6" Jabba the Hutt! Pretty much you need an exacto knife, green fake flower foam blocks, glue, more glue, some paint, and get creative w/ a few beads. That's pretty much it! they also give some suggestions for making the back component to the dais as well.

Clickeroo for tutorial!

 

Desmokifying collectibles.

There's nothing worse than buying a lot of pre-owned items online, having it arrive and WHAM - it reeks of cigarette smoke. I've had this happen to me several times and even though it's not pleasant, it's annoying, and well frankly gross - depending on the item & how badly they reek, you can get the smoke out.

Plastic

There are different types of plastic, you have the hard, hard plastic like was used on the vintage C-3PO 12" figure or you generally have a plastic that's a bit more porous and soft, like what is used on the smaller figures, Unleashed figures, etc. The hard plastic tends to be brittle and will shatter into a million pieces if you step on it, the porous plastics take a better beating before they smash.

Here are a few things that I've done to get the smoke out of both. Mind you that these tips might not work on everything, there may be better ways out there to get rid of it, but these are more natural ways that don't hurt the item.

1) Vinegar/water solution - I just started using this as a first assault method for attacking the stink. Find a large bowl or rubbermaid tub, one that will be large enough to hold your stinky toy. Then fill it with enough water so that if the toy was completely submerged, the water will cover it. There's probably a percentage on how much vinegar you should dump into the water, I do it somewhat blindly and by instinct. I pour enough in so that it starts fizzing in the water and the solution starts to really smell vinegary - but not put so much in that it's now reeking of vinegar (generally a cup or two depending on how much water you need - less obviously if it's not much water.) Take the toys and dump them in the solution. I've found that the vinegar doesn't hurt acrylic paint. Depending on how stinky the toys are - I'll keep them in for quite a while. If they're floating, I'll be sure to come in after around 30-45 minutes and flip the toys over and repeat the time. After they've had a good soaking, I'll remove them and let them air dry.

I find that solid, non-porous plastic will take to the vinegar and might need one more dunking, but otherwise, the toys should come out stink free. Porous plastics will take on the smell of the vinegar and you can't fully tell if the smoke is gone until they've fully dried. Don't dry them under heat, you'll just reactivate whatever smoke might still be hiding.

Test the toys later - if they still smell bad, give them a second or third dunking. If this doesn't fully remove the smoke smell - move onto option 2.

2) Fabric softener sheets/Heat/Time - At this point if the toy still smells you need to decide if the smell is still offensive or not. Putting a toy out on a shelf in the open w/ air circulating around it will eventually cause the smoke smell to go away, but there might always be a slight hint of smoke smell left behind. The next thing to do will require you basically forgetting you have the items - for a long time. Grab a plastic tub w/ a lid that's big enough to hold your items and get a box of fabric softener sheets. Wrap each item up in sheets, put them in the box, then for good measure throw some more sheets in the box before covering it.



Then - put the box somewhere where it gets warm - put it in the garage, in your attic, in a spare room w/o AC and then forget about the box. You can check on it in a month or so to see how things are going, but if the smell is still there, you need time for the sheets to do their work. Fabric softener sheets are designed to pull offensive smells out of clothing, they'll do that w/ your plastic toys. But because plastic is denser than fabric, it'll take time for this to work.

PAPER - you can use step 2 for destinking paper as well. I've had boxes of books that smelled musty and mildewy that I took fabric sheets, put them between pages, layered them in boxes, and let the heat bake them and the smell came out.


My general rule of thumb is if you've tried the first step, you smell the item, and it requires you to stick your nose ON it in order to still smell the smoke, that's pretty much a victory. That means there's only the slightest bit of smell left and it'll probably disappear w/ time on the shelf. If you can smell the smoke still while holding it out at a distance, even after doing the vinegar solution several times, you'll need to go for the long haul cleansing. Is this irritating? Yes, you bought the item to display it, not wait upwards of a year or more to eventually add it to your collection, however, after the odors are gone you do get a sense of satisfaction in knowing that you managed to save what many people would've thought would be an unsaveable toy. And you prevented another chunk of plastic from filling our already over crowded landfills.

 

In terms of removing smell, I did something a bit different for a toy that reeked of mildew. It was a Boglin rubber puppet toy, and our solution to destinking it was to shove a very fragrant balsam pine candle up its butt, stick that in a bag that had been prepared with other fragrant items, and cover it in dryer sheets. We closed the bag and shoved it in the back of a closet for a few weeks. Then, we brought it out and let the toy air out by a window. The mildew smell was pretty much gone and the interior of the toy smelled like the scented candle we had put in it.

For items that were caked with dust, I found that using hand soap and a sponge worked pretty well with removing it.

 

I want to create a 1:18 scale Imperial campsite for Stormtroopers in a forest setting. Anyone having any suggestions about props would be greatly appreciated. Either respond here or more easily respond to my email.

 

Just saw this cool site posted over on Yakface.com - if you want cool Death Star backdrops - come in 6" and 3.76" scales.

 

LAJ_FETT
PadmeLeiaJaina
(you'll probably know)

I have a few Hot Wheels vehicles and although they are detailed, I remember hearing you can give them a wash paint and this makes them look more like the actual ships.

Does anybody know if that's the case and/or a guide?


I'm mainly looking at my TFA Falcon.

ASDA currently has them for £1.75 each so was considering picking up a few and then trying it out.

 

I'm raising this from the dead to talk about a new process that I used to de-smoke some books.

I purchased 2 of these pouches to start with.I then got some charcoal type ones from Walmart and used them also.

I had 6 Star Wars hardback books that reeked of smoke. I put 3 in a box, put the deodorizing bags in the boxes and closed them up. Every few days I would go in and rotate the books around in the boxes, including turning them upside down so the bottom of the books could air out since they were still retaining the smell at that point. About 15 days in I took the initial pouches outside and sat them in the sun for 24 hours to recharge. I then got more pouches and put 2 more new ones in the boxes. Once I did this the pages in the books started to smell less and less like smoke. Finally after about 2 weeks I was able to take the first couple of books out. The rest of the books took a couple more weeks. But by the end of the month all 6 books are now smoke free. I do have them sitting w/ a few dryer sheets between pages - just in case.

I've moved onto using all of my de-smokers for a ton of Barbie dolls that I've acquired over the years who reek of smoke and must. I had a bunch in a large box w/ about 4 of the pouches but I wasn't seeing a lot of progress. When the books were done I moved the dolls into smaller boxes. Surprisingly I have an early Barbie - she's a number 5,6, or 7 - I think she has titian hair - not sure due to the nicotine that was stuck to it. I thought it was going to take her forever to have the smell removed, but she's almost smoke free. Next step will be to fully wash her hair (and body) and then let it dry and see how it smells. If it's all clear she can get her ponytail reset and she can become a part of my collection.

There's one mid '60's era twist and turn doll called a "Marlo flip" who I'm probably going to have to wash her hair and still work on de-smoking her - she is the worst of all of them, she reeks of Marlboros.

I found that for the dolls you can use rubbing alcohol on them. I don't recommend using it on faces but arms, legs, bodies take the rubbing alcohol well, whether they are hard or rubbery plastic. The bonus is if you scrub enough you not only can remove all nicotine off of the surface of the toys (yuck!) you also can remove ground in dirt. Several of the dolls were grungy dirty a combo of dirt and nicotine. When I gave them the full scrubbing they came out nice and clean. The alcohol also helped as a first wave of defense against the smoke. Hard plastic bodies - about 80% of the smell vanished just from the alcohol. (I wouldn't recommend bathing them in alcohol, just scrubbing with it.) The rubber type legs used on Barbies for about 55 yeas they usually retain the smell - a lot. The alcohol killed the smell by about 60%.

I'm expecting that it'll take a couple of months to get them all de-smoked. I have another box w/ doll clothes also getting the treatment. I'm hoping they'll be faster because I have a ton of clothes to desmoke.