Dents, Chips, Cracks: What We Can Repair

Fiberglass is one of the more repairable materials a figure can be made from, which is a large part of why we use it. Not everything is fixable invisibly though, and it’s better to know which is which before something happens.

Surface scuffs and shallow chips

If the paint is damaged but the shell underneath is intact, this is the easy case. Clean it, fill if there’s a low spot, sand, prime the patch, then airbrush the colour in thin passes and reseal with matte. Done well, you can’t find it under normal room light. Matte helps enormously here, since matching a flat sheen is much easier than matching a gloss one.

What doesn’t work is touching up with a brush and no clear coat. The colour may match and the sheen won’t, and an unsealed patch also collects dust differently from the rest of the figure.

Dents with no crack

Common on large flat areas if something leans against the piece. The shell has flexed rather than broken, and it often comes back on its own over a day or two. Heat speeds that up, gently, with a hairdryer held at a distance and moved constantly. Too much heat in one spot softens the paint, so this is a patience job, not a power one.

Cracks

A hairline in the shell can be stabilised from behind with glass cloth and resin, then filled and painted from the front. The crack usually disappears visually. What you can’t undo is the cause, so if a figure has cracked once, look hard at where it’s standing before you put it back.

A crack that runs through a load-bearing area, the ankle, where an arm meets the body, is a different question. Those can be repaired structurally but the piece will always be weaker there, and we’d rather be straight about that than tell you it’s as good as new.

Breaks

A clean break in two pieces is often repairable to the point where the seam is hard to find. A break with missing material is not, and a shattered area, which is what happens when a solid piece hits a hard floor edge, usually isn’t worth attempting.

What we’d tell you to try first

Take photos in good light, from a couple of angles, including one from a metre away so the damage is in context. Most small issues turn out to be scuffs that need less than people fear, and a photo usually settles it faster than a description.

Thin protruding parts are the vulnerable ones on any character. Architect Engineer Panda carries a rolled plan, and that’s the first thing to check after any knock.