I started restoring my Mechs tonight. I picked one and ran with it.
The tools and supplies are rather basic. I used a fine-point sharpie instead of the pencil I normally use for photo quality. I also needed a razor and a couple of files. For glue, I used Tacky Glue and Superglue together, which is an interesting trick.
The final item is the material needed to resculpt the arm, a piece of soapstone. This product is found in the welding supply section of your local hardware store. Soapstone is incredibly soft yet heat resistant, which means you can mark materials and hit them with enough energy to melt metal without burning up your markings.
It comes in two forms, a flat bar, and cylinders that fit into a pen-like holder. The cylinders are nice for columns and such.
The first thing I did was roughly trace the arm I wished to sculpt. It doesn't have to be a work of art AND it needs to be bigger than the arm you want.
Soapstone has a grain just like wood. Unlike wood, it is remarkably honorable to your tools, meaning you can push and pull against the grain. What soapstone does not like is compression or impact. It will shatter like very soft glass.
Whittling down this one piece took about 15 minutes most of which was spent taking pictures. One item I did not mention was a plastic bag to sweep all of the dust and fragments into. I didn't take a picture of that because it looks like a bag of crack.
I try to roughly carve the arm down to the right size and proportions. Notice that I don't cut the arm away from the larger piece. It's too small for that.
I used a mech to size up the arm as I work. Luckily, I have mechs with broken right and left hands, so I have a model to work from.
Once I am down to the right size and proportions, I carefully... Carefully... cut the arm away from the bar. When making these cuts I work my way into the bar, not away from it.
These are actually cuts, every bit of work so far is with a razor. This is the other reason you don't remove the piece from the bar. You'll have nothing to hang on to and cut yourself. The other devastating disaster is dropping the part on the floor and chipping it so badly it's useless.
I skipped all of the pictures of sanding with files. It's super boring to look at. A file will knife right through soapstone, so go slow. You can't exactly put the material back.
Well, actually you can add material back but it is annoying, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. It also makes fine-tuning your model very difficult.
Remember the bag of soapstone dust and chips? You can apply layers of glue to the damaged portion and add soapstone chips and dust to it. The problem with this methodology is it takes time to dry and the glue/stone laminate is really tough stuff. Filing becomes much harder. It's also super sad if the glue slips off the model and you have to glue it back on a second time. Thankfully, the glue and soapstone mix will keep it's shape, it's only annoying.
Anyway, the last step is to add the details, like the etched-in lines. You can get remarkably detailed in this work, like scrimshaw on ivory. You might be tempted to use a razor to do some of this work. Don't. Instead, use a pin with a handle. I personally like removing a rubber eraser from a pencil, shoving a pin through it, and gluing it back into place.
In order to mesh the parts up, I filed the metal of the model down into a V-shaped point and did the reverse on the soapstone part. This increases the surface area and allows you to feel when the part is in the right place. I've shown you the final image, but I want to show off one more trick with the second last image.
See the white spot of glue on the metal model? That isn't just glue, it's soapstone powder on the tacky glue. I put the super glue on the soapstone part and touch them together. There is a quick chemical reaction between all three substances and the dry time is about 5 seconds. It's pretty cool.
I am saving another trick for my next post. See you there.
