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Here's how Smokescreen arrived to me
Below is Smokescreen after restoration
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The restoration of Smokescreen:
When I received
Smokescreen he was broken in 5 different places. His hood was in 4 parts and both of his rear windows were broken. Also, one
of his previous owners had glued his legs into standing position. But, there were some redeeming qualities to him. Smokescreen's
roof had amazingly never been broken! He had great paint and clean windows all around. Also, his factory labels and joints
were in very good condition.
The first thing I did was clean Smokescreen. His leg decals were placed on the rear windows
so I removed them with a residue cleaner. The rest was just dusting and general cleaning with cotton swabs.
Next,
I had to literaly tear Smokescreen's legs out of place because they were glued in. This left some black from the leg insert
on his white leg piece. I tried to desolve it, but couldn't. So I carefully removed all the unwanted areas with my hobby knife.
It left a couple of light scrape marks on his legs, but it is not noticable unless you study him up-close.
Before
I started trying to glue Smokescreen's broken pieces together I got really familiar with them. I practiced fitting them together
without glue first to see how clean the breaks were. Luckily, all the breaks were clean. For the job I used a super glue with
a ink-pen-like head (found in the school supplies section of any department store). It really helped because you can be very
precise in placement and control of the glue. Luckily, all of the pieces fit and held together just fine.
The result
of the gluing is that Smokescreen has three very fine break lines on his hood. The good thing is that his launchers and missiles
do a great job of hiding these. Smokescreens back windows look great. Besides a couple of paint chips from the break it is
very hard to tell they were ever glued together.
One problem I experienced from this project was the fact that Smokescreen's
back windows don't want to "go up" far enough to allow him to transform into robot mode. I really thought I was going to break
them again when transforming him, but he does transform. They fit together perfect and do just fine in car mode. I don't know,
maybe I was off a little when gluing them, but the pieces slid right into each other perfectly when I was gluing.
After
everything was said and done, Smokescreen came out looking great as far as I am concerned. I bought a parter to replace smokescreen's
hood, but have not done that yet. I really want to see how long the glue job holds. I treat Smokescreen just like any other
bot in my collection and he is holding up just fine. He is definately one of my favorite pieces in my collection.
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