The Energon Pub

I picked up my ROTF Scalpel a couple of days ago and I was really stoked to get him. I thought he had a great design and a good transformation for a scout. Plus the malevolance he portayed in the movie made it even cuter. Much to my disappointment as soon as he was pulled out of a perfect, uncrushed box 3 legs fell to the floor before they were even touched, after inspection I saw that 5 of the upper cup joints for the leg ball joints were cracked completely in half. I knew that Wal-Mart would just say that it was broken during transformation and wouldn't replace it so I started checking a few chemicals I use in computer & auto repair to see if there was a good one that wouldn't reactly badly with the plastic, i.e. super glue causing discoloration and brittleness. 5 Minute Epoxy Plastic Weld which can be attained at pretty much any auto parts store was my best bet. So I grabbed the thinnest pair of needlenose pliers I had mixed up a small batch and got to it. If you remove your legs from their sockets and preferably remove the leg assembly from the body this is a pretty quick and easy job even if you're not a modder. Use the needlenose pliers inserted into the cup joints to spread the cups far enough so you have a good 1/16 or so crack, then use a toothpick to push in the epoxy, don't worry about being a little messy as it is pretty easy to get off of a plastic surface just by using your fingernail. I used a few Scunchi miniature rubber bands to wrap the cup joints to keep pressure on them. Let them sit for at least 20 minutes at room temperature, then you can scrape any excess off of the joints and get after the assembly with a hair dryer on low/cool for about 2 minutes just to give it a little bit quicker dry time and you can go to high/hot if you are careful to condition it as well if you plan on playing with it a lot. If you have loose legs that don't have broken sockets then you can also use the epoxy to make a thin(very very thin) layer all over the ball and that will effectively thicken it. But after doing all this my Scalpel is great, i've even managed to get him into some cool poses like a robot bull bucking with the Frenzy from my Barricade riding him. Just thought i'd share since I saw where quite a few others had the same problem as myself. Hope it works as well for y'all as it did for me.

You must really enjoy modeling and stuff like that if you'd go through that much trouble. I'd just go buy another Scalpel and hope to get a better one.

GuyIncognito wrote:You must really enjoy modeling and stuff like that if you'd go through that much trouble. I'd just go buy another Scalpel and hope to get a better one.

From what I read in another thread, it's quicker to fix than take back, exchange and hope for the best!

Thanks for the guide! I never bought Scalpel because of the seemingly common leg construction issues. However, I don't mind buying it if there's a good method for repairing the legs. I've been taking apart some of my Transformers for maintenance and joint tightening lately. I enjoy getting my hands dirty.

This might help me Scalpel escape his forever banish to his alt mode.

I am by no means good with models(I haven't done one in years) but I really dig the way that Scalpel looks so I had to salvage him somehow. From what I read around the web there are quite a few Scalpels floating around that have the bad legs and since the only place around me that had them in stock was the place I got mine, I figured they were probably all from the same bad batch. I hope that the fix works as well for you guys that try it as it did for me. I'd appreciate any posts letting me know of success for you or if you find any better mods. I personally thought of a good one earlier I will try if I ever have them break again. Use a small drill to drill through the cup and ball joints on the sides straight through and use some watch band pins to secure it all together. Since I don't need forward/backward articulation on the legs(it barely has any in the first place) I figure this would be a good forever fix, and it shouldn't hurt the value of it either as this is a fix i've seen HasTakTomy use in the past on some mold revisions. Laters