Instant mold to the rescue... dwarf gyrocopter... repaired.

A little while ago, I learned of a new product called Instant Mold... past blog post here. I ordered a pack as it seemed a very useful product...

Well I tried it out over the weekend...

Whilst going through my old warhammer dwarf stuff to sell, I came across one of my old broken gyrocopters... now back in its day, over a decade ago if not more, I was mighty pleased with this piece and even though I rarely played the game, I had this piece on display in my lounge, riding atop my CD stacking unit...

One day I came home from work and noticed it missing from its usual perch...

A quick search round the room found it just under the sofa... the base of the flying base was missing and part of one of the rotor blades had been broken off... it looked like it had been bent back and forth until it snapped!

I never found out the culprit but I had my suspicions... with various cats, dogs and people the potential suspects!

Anyway that's ancient history... since then its languished forlornly in a box...

So coming across it at the weekend, and remembering the Instant Mold, I thought I'd see what I could do.

The Instant Mold is fairly easy to use ... just put it in some hot water and wait a few minutes for it to soften, then press the item you want to copy into it, then drop it into cold water and it sets firm though malleable enough to get the copied item to pop out of the mold... so it's effectively a single side press mold. You could get clever and copy both sides of an item and put the two halfs together, but for this test I just did it single sided.

Basically I copied the top half of the intact end of the rotor blade. Then I mixed up some regular milliput and pressed it into the mold, and let it set for 24hrs...

Next day I popped it out of the mold, trimmed and filed it down, and glued it into position...

It came out like this...

Sadly the light glare has hidden the copied detail, but the mold and milliput have taken the detail of the copied rotor blade well, including the surface detail...

With the fixed blade in place, I was able to repaint up the model sufficiently enough to make it sale-able, and made a new base out of 3mm MDF.

Et voila! Good as new again, and will hopefully net me a few dollars in auction sale...

Personally I think this style of gyrocopter looks far better than the current 'flying boat' model GW have released as a gyrocopter... it looks bloody horrible!

Must admit I did ponder keeping it and converting it for Empire of the Dead... but I think its just a little too warhammer-ish and substituting the dwarf with a human would be a tall ask... so happy to sell it on and use the funds for some more LOTR goodies...