This page lists my 'Spares-box Sweethearts': Girls with parts that required repair, got successfully repaired and joined my (or someone elses) CG collection.
This page lists my 'Spares-box Sweethearts': Girls with parts that required repair, got successfully repaired and joined my (or someone elses) CG collection.
Nothing is unbreakable, not even Cy Girl bodies, so as soon as I started my CG collection I set out to learn how to repair these bodies.
The best way to practice repairs is to get some broken bodies. Apart from that, several figures suffered damage in the mail so within a couple of years I had plenty of CG stuff to practice on.
I put all of these broken and damaged bodies in my spares box, together with some heads-with-flaws and broken accessories such as hands, feet and bootfeet.
I consider the Girls emerging from my spares box to be my 'Spares-box Sweethearts', partly because I tend to grow more easily fond of a successfully repaired figure than of one that I assembled from new parts, but also because the results often exceed my expectations.
The list below is ordered by completion date, oldest first.
The first CG body repair I did was repairing broken knee joints.
This body I bought loose, it came with two broken knee joints and without ankle cups but the lower legs were included.
After figuring how to repair the broken knee joints I made a pair of ankle cups and started looking for some hands and a head that would match the skin tone.
Finding the hands was easy but I was still looking for a matching head when an opportunity came up to sell the body with hands.
I had some spare matching v1.5 wrist posts so before selling I converted some of the v1 hands to v1.5 specs.
The second body I tried to repair was a loose CG v1.5 body with a missing ankle cup.
All I had to do was to replicate a v1.5 ankle cup. It only took two tries to create an ankle cup that was stiff enough to hold the ankle joint in its desired position.
After completing the repair I fitted a tan OJI Mia head, some Perfect Body hands and clothes and Bratz sneakers fitted with FemBasix pegs just so I could put a complete figure on the pictures.
After taking the pictures I disassembled the figure again. Some time later I used the body for Cutey Harley and the head for Iris.
Another body I bought loose, this time the limbs that had broken off were not included. The seller was so kind to include a pair of loose CG v2 legs but fitting those proved not as straightforward as it seemed due to the different types of joints. However the v2 legs did prove very useful for figuring out how to create a v2 ankle cup and for studying the hip joint assembly.
I had just completed fitting a new left arm out of Plastruct tubing when a MWD discussion on broken figures prompted me to fit her with a head, dress her up and take a picture of her. I happened to have a cute spare FemBasix Lia head on the workbench and so Claudia was 'born'.
In all it took five major repairs and several 'tweaks' and minor repairs over a period of three years before Claudia could stand on her own two feet.
Claudia was my first true 'Spares-box Sweetheart': she spent a quite some time propped up in my projects box and already was a Girl with a face and a name before I completed repairing her whereas the earlier ones were headless bodies that required one or two straightforward repairs before being turned into a Girl.
The first Ash v2 head I got off eBay had misprinted eyes: the black pupils were not properly centered on the irises (probably an original Cool Girl head that was rejected at the factory).
I hadn't painted or repainted any eyes sofar so fixing this was a bit daunting. It did work out okay though: I enlarged the pupils by using a toothpick with a small amount of black paint on its tip.
So the head never was in my spares box, but the body had been for a while: after fixing the pupils I needed a body and the ERTL body in my spares box happened to match the shade of tan of the head well.
The ERTL body was originally from an ERTL 'Turkey Huntress' figure, it looks a bit similar to a CG v1 body but there are some differences: the neck post is larger, the hands are permanently attached to the arms, the ankle joints are flanges instead of ball joints and the feet have no heels, instead the legs are extended all the way to the floor.
It turned out that those funny feet worked well in a pair of FemBasix boots, so all I had to do was trim the neck post to adapt a CG head.
After trimming the neck post I sanded the body with a grade 1800 polishing pad to reduce its glossy shine.
That's the full story behind Caroline.
This brand new body got damaged in the mail. I repaired the broken knee joint, fitted a 'cloned' blonde Ice head, dressed her up in Ice costume and boots and named her Blanche.
A while ago I got this nude Blaze, the head was repainted and partially rooted with thick strands of wool.
I liked the expression on the repainted face, but there were some bald spots showing on the head and the reroot job had left some damage to the neck, so I decided to repair and reroot this head.
After removing the strands of wool, I repaired the oversized holes that the reroot job had left and used the head for my first reroot trials. Later I removed the hair I applied for the trials and did a full reroot with brown saran hair.
In the meantime I used the CG v1.0 body for Destiny. Some time later I got a brand new Destiny CG v1.5 body and used that for Diane.
Another brand new body that got damaged in the mail. This time the damage was so severe that I dropped it in my spares box without even taking a picture of it.
Later when doing repairs on Claudia I took the left arm and swapped that with the DIY arm I initially made for Claudia.
Some time later I decided to try and patch up this body afterall.
Then I received a PB v2.1 head with skin tone flaws, fitted that to the body and that's how Vera came about.
Vera is my second true 'Spares-box Sweetheart', she took over the spot in my projects box that Claudia left and has been a frequent 'patient' on my work bench for several years.
This TTL L2.0B body appeared to be fine but the lower waist joint snapped when I handled it, resulting in quite a complicated repair.
After repairing the body I decided to try to trim down the bulges of the elbow joints on the insides of the arms, then I fitted a beautiful TTL head, dressed her in a Race Queen costume and named her Hitomi.
This Armoury body ended up in my spares box after I took its arms to fit to Claudia. I did not like the look of the Armoury body so I preferred to repair a CG body by breaking up this Armoury body over trying to improve the looks of the Armoury body.
A long time later I decided to try to improve the looks of the body and after a lot of sanding I was happy with the result. However it was still missing its right lower arm. Since I had nothing suitable I ended up making a little arm stump out of leftover bits and fitted that.
Then I added a cute Barbie 'Millie' head and named her Claire.
When I received this nude ZC Girl Walking Paradise Queeny figure it came with half of the right hip joint broken.
Since the hip joint is quite complex and the broken part touches other moving parts it took me a while to figure out how to repair this without ruining the figure.
I started a tutorial on the repair even before doing the actual repair, in the end I went for a simple fix and added this to the tutorial.
I later turned the repaired body into Kassandra by adding a lovely Barbie 'Crystal/Kassandra' head.
My spares box contains a lot of parts that were acquired from fellow figure modelers.
Among those parts was a loose body of a tan 'Get Set Club' figure, no arms or legs, just the cracked open body parts. With a bit of searching and matching I found a pair of tan CGv1 arms and some legs of unknown origin that could be made to fit and decided to try and turn these parts into a body.
I also had a loose tan Barbie 'New Summer' head that needed some repairs and paint touch up, so after doing so and after completing the body I fitted the head to the body and named her Dahlia.
This brand new TTL L1.0A figure looked a bit strange: the gap between the chest section and the center section was larger than with other TTL bodies and when moving the chest joint something inside was scraping against the plastic.
Inspecting the chest joint showed that the joint was assembled in the wrong order: the flexible plastic disc that was supposed to be inside the center section had ended up between the chest and center section instead.
Using a small flat bladed screwdriver I managed to work the disc into the chest section without breaking the joint.
I later used this body for the pictures of the TTL lower body modification tutorial. Some time later I trimmed the bulges on the elbow hinges, sanded down the top and front edges of the arm sockets and sanded down the lower edges of the rib cage. Then I fitted a cute Barbie head and named her Bianca.
This cloned Barbie body was left-over when I used its head for Denyse.
It happened to be the only body with a skin tone close to that of the tan Kayla/Lea head I wanted to use.
I changed this bodies fixed neck joint into a CG-style ball jointed one and wanted to replace the tiny arched Barbie-style feet with larger ones, but once I had fitted new legs, the replacement feet fell apart.
A little later the rigid ankle mount inside one of the legs also broke, rendering the leg rather floppy. I have yet to come up with a repair or replacement for the lower legs, so I decided to make some temporary stump boots so I could move Kayla from the projects box into my display cabinet.
Then the torso joint of the body broke. To repair this I had to take Kayla apart.
Once repaired, I decided not to put Kayla back on this body and instead use it for Tia.
I still plan to fit Tia with some lower legs.
I received this brand new Caucasian Eve body with a manufacturing error: the anchor for the righthand knee joint was inserted too low into the thigh. The joint is functional but it doesn't look right and the error made the righthand leg some 4mm taller than the left one.
I have yet to repair this, it requires cutting open the thigh along the glue seams and repositioning the anchor of the joint.
