Vintage Mego The Lizard Knee pin repair - Toy Polloi

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Coming from the farthest reaches of the universe, to challenge the worst toy repairs on earth, is the most powerful hero ever: Toy-Polloy! [00:00:10] Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another video from Toy-Polloy, and in today's video we are going to be repairing the broken knee on this vintage Mego lizard figure. As you can see here he's had a bit of a battle with Spider-Man and his leg has broken off. Now because I have all of the parts on this figure it should be a fairly simple fix, but it's a fix I don't think I've ever shown on the channel before, so let's get on with the project, and I'll show you how to do a quick repair on these vintage Mego dolls. So here we have the lizard, and as you can see his leg has broken off, and this is an incredibly common problem with Mego dolls. There are two bits of pin that hold the knee in place, and the smaller part, which is the sort of inner part that pops inside, has a little pip on the end and that will snap off, and then the knee falls off. As I say it is a very common problem, so common in fact you can buy reproductions of most of these knee pins. But with lizard he needs a green pin, and I don't think they make reproductions. So to fix this one the normal way that I would do it is actually just pop the leg back together, and then glue this broken pin in place, just with a bit of superglue. And that will hold it, and it's a very quick fix. But as we have both parts I thought I might try something slightly different. So although I said at the start of this video we were going to do a very quick fix, I'm going to try something slightly different today. And we're actually going to try and repair this broken little pin part, because we have both parts of it. Now you can't just glue it, because that glue wouldn't be strong enough. It would just break off as soon as you try to pop it back in place. So what I want to do is actually to drill a hole through both parts, and actually use a steel pin to hold it all in place. We can insert that through both pieces, and then glue it in place. As I say I've not actually tried this before, because this is an incredibly small part, and you don't often find both parts of this pin. But let's give it a go today. So I've already got a very small drill bit in my pin vise here, which is about the same diameter as the pin that I want to use to repair it. And the trick is we need to drill a small hole into this piece, which shouldn't be too hard, because it's actually fairly large to hold. But we also need to drill a small hole into the broken off pip. Not quite sure how I'm going to do that, but I will give it a go. That's the bit. If it goes wrong then I will just end up gluing this broken pin into the knee. But let's give this a go and see if we can actually drill a couple of holes through these pieces, see what we can do. [00:02:47] Speaker ?: So, let's go. [00:02:59] Speaker 2: Well, after much careful drilling you can see I've now actually managed to drill a hole through that little broken pip. And we've also drilled a hole into this piece here, and you can see that I've got the pin through it at the moment, just so that I can see if everything lines up, which I think it pretty much does. So, the next thing we need to do is actually cut this pin down, because I've only sort of drilled in a short way into that, maybe about five millimetres. So, we need to cut the pin down so that it's just about five millimetres left there. We can then glue all these together just with some super glue. I might try and rough up the edge of the pin as well, just with my pliers here, so that the glue has got something to sort of grip onto. So, I'm just going to use the cutting part of the pliers here to sort of gently rough up the surface. That will mean that there is just a better sort of a bond between the plastic and this pin, because the pin is obviously lovely and shiny, and the hole that I've drilled in probably has some quite nice rough edges. So, it's just sort of adds some marks and some dents to the pin there. That feels good. Now, I can chop this down. So, we said we needed about five millimetres plus the length of the end there. So, if I cut that to about that length, I should be able to cut it just like that. Now, we can do a test fit as well. So, I'm going to drop that little pip onto there. All of these pieces are incredibly small now, so every time we sort of cut something a bit smaller, it gets more and more tricky. And that should go onto there. And if I push it in, you can see that's what we're trying to do. Basically, we want the metal pin inside it to give it some sort of reinforcement. But I also want the head of the pin on that end to help sort of pull everything in together. I've not tried this before, as I say, but it sort of feels like it should work. We're basically reinforcing everything. Then we can push this back through the other part of the knee pin here, and hopefully it will hold together. If it doesn't, I can do my old-fashioned fix and just put a bit of glue on everything. But yeah, let's try that. So, let's try and glue this all together now. So, what we need to do is drop a very small amount of superglue onto the end of this. Like that. And that's probably enough, because we can actually then use that to sort of go along the length of the metal pin there and also push everything in place. I'm going to end up a little bit gluey, I can tell. I am a little bit gluey, but that's fine. That sometimes happens when you're fixing toys. Let's make sure that's rotated round. It's in the right position. Push everything in place, and I'm going to let that set to make sure the superglue has plenty of time to go off. [00:05:59] Speaker 1: T-O-Y-B-E-S-T-R-O-I. That is incorrect. Try again. [00:06:08] Speaker 2: OK, that has now had plenty of time to set, and it feels pretty sturdy. And it actually looks like an original pin again. The only thing that sort of gives it away is the bit of metal pin that you can see sticking through the end there. So, if this does work, I will put a little bit of paint on that just to hide it. But at the moment, as this is the first time I've ever done this, I'm not 100% sure it will work. So, let's give it a go. You can see we have the other half of the knee pin in there. What we've got to do is pop the leg on, and then push this in place. And it should sort of click once it goes through, and it goes through the other side of the pin. It's fairly awkward to do these. I'm actually going to get a pair of pliers, and just sort of push these together, and we'll see what happens. That's fallen out. That was my mistake there. Let's put that back in again. Right. That has gone through. Do you know what? I think that might have worked. It's certainly in place. Ah, no. There we go. It hasn't worked. I was over hopeful. Yeah, that hasn't worked. You can see the actual pin part has fallen out. So, it's just not strong enough. Such a shame, because it was such a good idea. But yeah, that hasn't worked. So, we need to push the end of that pin out. You can see that it just hasn't glued properly onto the rest of the pin. So, the metal part has just not glued into the plastic. Yeah, that is a shame, because it sort of feels like it should work. But yeah, it just hasn't. Maybe I could put a slightly longer piece of pin in. Maybe that's worth trying if we drill a hole all the way through that piece, and then put a bit of a longer pin through. So, it goes right the way through to this end. Maybe that'll have enough surface area. Might as well give it a go. Nothing lost. So, let's remove that bit of pin from there. I will get another steel pin, and we will drill the hole a little bit longer, and see if that works. Right. So, what we're going to do this time is, I've drilled a slightly deeper hole into this part here. So, I've drilled as deep as I can go without coming out of the other side. I've got another pin here, and what I've done is slightly sort of bent the end of it. So, the shaft of the pin is no longer straight. It's got some sort of wibbles and wobbles to it, and I'm hoping that'll add an extra little bit of friction when we insert it into this part here. So, again, we can do the same as we did last time. I'll cut the end of this off, but a little bit longer this time, because we have a little bit more of a hole that we can push the pin into. So, hopefully, if I push that in, it should still go in just about deep enough, which it has. And it's now, as I say, got some sort of bends in it, which will give a little bit more friction inside the hole on this one. Again, all we can do is glue it in place, and we'll hopefully see a sort of a change to it. You never know. This may be exactly the same as the last one and just just not work, but it's certainly worth a try. And I like having a go on these things, because every once in a while you'll come up with a new way of fixing something, and I sort of feel that this should be a good way of fixing it. But at the moment, as you can see, trial and error. That's the only thing we can do. Try, see what happens. If it breaks, we'll go back to fixing it the old-fashioned way, but it's always worth a go. That's the end on there. We can now put superglue on the pin. Make sure there's a nice amount on there. Then we'll push it into the hole and let everything set again and give it another go. Okay, let's see if this works. Second time's the charm, as they say. We'll pop that into there. I'm going to grab my pliers here, because you have to sort of carefully squeeze these two pieces together. Okay, that's squeeze done. It feels pretty good. I can see, actually, the other side of the pin is slightly split there, but that is holding in place. So I'm going to say that is working not too bad. It's probably not the strongest of fixes, but it does mean that this character can be posed again. And at the moment, you can just see a shiny piece of the metal pin there. So I'm going to go and get some paints and we'll just drop a little bit of paint on that so that we can hide it. But actually, when the trousers are rolled down, you probably can't see anyway. But I'm going to put some paint on there anyway, just because I can. But yeah, that doesn't feel too bad. So a longer piece of pin and a slight bend in the pin, that seems to have glued. So right, let's get the paints out and we'll give that a quick coat of paint. To paint the pin I'm just going to use some Valacia model colours. I've got this light green, which is actually a pretty good sort of colour match, possibly a little bit too light. So to that I've just added some blue and it's a pretty close match. It's going to be such a tiny area that we're painting. I'm not too fussed if it's not perfect. And again, the trousers will be hiding it anyway. So this is just a stage that, you know, really probably doesn't need to be done, but you know, I'm here, I might as well do it. So mixing those two colours together gives us a slightly darker green with a little bit of a blue tinge. Let's just drop that on. Oh yeah, that is actually pretty good. By the time that's dry, you really will be hard pushed to spot it. And as I say, the trousers hide it anyway. So let's let that dry and then we'll look at the finished figure. And here we go. The figure is now ready to fight Spider-Man again. When I started this video, I was expecting just to glue the pins back together in his knee. But in the end, as you saw, I came up with a better fix because we had all of the pieces that we needed. And just using a normal metal pin, we were able to reattach the pieces and get that leg pin clicked back in place. A little bit of paint to hide the repair. And this figure is now ready to go back on display and is fully poseable again. So sometimes when I fix a project, things change along the way. And in this instance, the initial plan I had wasn't how I ended up fixing it, but it's been a nice fun project. Hopefully this video has been of interest to you. If it has, then make sure to hit the subscribe button and tap the bell to be notified each time I upload a new video. And if you've really enjoyed it, then why not think about becoming a patron of the channel? You get early access to all of my restoration videos, plus access to an exclusive video series called On The Cutting Mat, where I show projects and restorations that you won't see anywhere else. So have a think about that. And thanks for watching. [00:12:48] Speaker 1: Toi Ploi. Subscribe for more great videos. [00:12:53] Speaker ?: Toi Ploi. Toi Ploi. Thank you.