The Iron Man disintegrating hip swivel joint

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rocbolt

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So a funny thing happened when I was doing some re-arranging of the House Party shelf, I picked up Disco and his leg comically stayed behind, standing for a second, then falling over. The swivel joint plastic gave up the ghost, leaving oil residue and just plain falling apart. The other leg came off with a gentle twist, same issue

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Some slow but steady levering got all the panels off to access the part
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That's the piece, looks like one cast part but the plastic has just weakened and failed
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Given the state of the plastic I figured gluing it would just end up breaking again, and there are a lot of glued panels in the way when this is assembled, so I looked for some metal hardware to fix it but wasn't finding anything thin enough, so I put it on the project shelf for a while

But I recently got a 3D printer finally, blundered around tinkercad and tossed together a quick model

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Here's the STL, printed it sideways to keep the layer lines perpendicular to the stress

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All better! Ready for the next suit to croak.
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Also a good time to illustrate how much even completely indirect and infrequent sunlight will still cause damage. This guy is purple now, not blue. I pulled the open shoulder piece out of the box for comparison. They stopped with the soft plastic undies but the collar is still flexible material, look how much worse it got. This is a 2016 figure too, far from the oldest of the plastic era
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Mk 9 as well
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Dry climate <30% indoor humidity, and any sunlight has passed though uv tinted glass and a sheer curtain and bounced off at least one wall in this room to interact with the figures. Its just a matter of time
 
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Dang!! Glad you were able to repair via 3D printing (it really is transforming the hobby in great ways). Re-painting is the part that scares me though.

While nothing is forever it does really bother me how so many HT figures deteriorate so quickly. I yesterday dug out some 1990's bendems figures and apart from being grubby from 3 decades of play the rubber was split/crack free and flexible. If cheap toys can do it why can't high end products be made to last?
 
Man, I really need to get into this 3D printing stuff. It’s awesome you can just print out your part like that.
simple parts like that should be easy even for beginner novice hobbyists provided you have specific measurements of the part needed (calipers are definitely needed). Plenty free CAD options available to make the parts such as Fusion360, Tinkercad, FreeCad etc etc plus there are tons of tutorials on youtube
 
Happened to my Mk 50. Right arm joint disintegrated, the arm just fell of one day. Look inside the plastic crumbled.
 
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