This Week In Your Plastic Crack, Action Figures and Toy Collection 26 26

[PKJ]

4 minutes ago, comicwiz said:

If it's not too much trouble, I'd love to see any pics you might have.

Regarding my quesiton on who you used to sell, I meant you said you dropped off your last SW this week, wondered what it was and who you used.

I added a link to the Awing run.

I used Tom Derby, nothing special at all just left over sealed ships and carded figures.

[followtheleader]

7 hours ago, PKJ said:

Since there seems to be some love for ARAH. Here is my Cobra "Naval" shelf. Have a line on a Sealed AFA 85 Water Moccasin that I hope to close on shortly. The Action force box is not sealed but the rest on the shelf is. The EEL on the Brazilian gun is also Brazilian. 

I have had carded sets of both Gi Joe up to 87 (except Mutt and Junkyard oddly enough) and every SW cardback version for every figure. Tom Derby brokered my Star Wars collection in 08 but I actually enjoy collecting loose more now.

Thanks for the kind words.

Phillip

 

 

Though I have a number of carded items, I also enjoy collecting loose more now too. 

My MOTU collection is virtually all carded.  But my Joes are overwhelmingly loose. 

Patrick

[MisterX]

A question for the Star Wars collectors --

I'm thinking of picking up a loose, AFA graded Jawa. I see there are a lot of stitching variations. It also seems like some sellers (cough, on eBay, cough) are linking certain colors of stitching to the "first 12," or "original 12." Which, I guess is referring to the original twelve figures for sale. Completed sales seem to indicate (at least to this novice) that non-brown stitches sell for a little more. 

Is this all hooey or do the stiches really reveal when a loose figure was manufactured? I've searched a couple sites and all I've found are some really detailed pictures of capes, but nothing more specific about manufacturing dates.

Thanks in advance!

[comicwiz]

4 hours ago, MisterX said:

A question for the Star Wars collectors --

I'm thinking of picking up a loose, AFA graded Jawa. I see there are a lot of stitching variations. It also seems like some sellers (cough, on eBay, cough) are linking certain colors of stitching to the "first 12," or "original 12." Which, I guess is referring to the original twelve figures for sale. Completed sales seem to indicate (at least to this novice) that non-brown stitches sell for a little more. 

Is this all hooey or do the stiches really reveal when a loose figure was manufactured? I've searched a couple sites and all I've found are some really detailed pictures of capes, but nothing more specific about manufacturing dates.

Thanks in advance!

The only Jawa which we know for certain was part of the first SW wave is the vinyl cape Jawa (VCJ). The only exception is an Austrialian variation VCJ which appeared on a later ESB wave cardback, but we can distinguish this from the US/Canadian/UK VCJ because the Toltoys (Aussie) one has a reddish cape.

While variant collectors do follow stitching differences, the Jawa with cloth cape continued to appear up until the very last wave, which was the POTF.

While there is a COO specific Jawa that is believed to only have been used with the vinyl cape, don't pay too much attention to the stitching variations. or claims one is specific to a first wave. 

If AFA grading is any indication, they label all cloth cape Jawa's with 1977 KENNER STAR WARS.

Edited September 15, 2018 by comicwiz

[Kreton]

I picked these up locally from a retired toy dealer a few months back. The cards/bubbles are a little rough but still a fun find.

 

 

[Parabellum]

@PKJ

Nice Joe collection!

[MisterX]

3 hours ago, comicwiz said:

The only Jawa which we know for certain was part of the first SW wave is the vinyl cape Jawa (VCJ). The only exception is an Austrialian variation VCJ which appeared on a later ESB wave cardback, but we can distinguish this from the US/Canadian/UK VCJ because the Toltoys (Aussie) one has a reddish cape.

While variant collectors do follow stitching differences, the Jawa with cloth cape continued to appear up until the very last wave, which was the POTF.

While there is a COO specific Jawa that is believed to only have been used with the vinyl cape, don't pay too much attention to the stitching variations. or claims one is specific to a first wave. 

If AFA grading is any indication, they label all cloth cape Jawa's with 1977 KENNER STAR WARS.

Thanks, Joe, I figured you knew the answer!

[F For Fake]

A couple of years ago, I started collecting signatures on action figures. I wouldn't deface any vintage or valuable figures, naturally, but for recently released stuff I thought it was a fun alternative to 8x10 photos, which I don't have much use for.

I've been waiting for Manu Bennett for a while now, as he has canceled on Lexington Comic Con TWICE. In the meantime I've managed to get all of the other Reaction Arrow figures signed. Well, this weekend at Cinci Comic Expo, I finally got my figure signed! Could have maybe done without the Missus whispering "He's HOT!" from the sidelines, but hey, what can you do?

They also had three Gi Joe voice actors, so i decided I needed them as well. I don't collect the 25th anniversary figures, but I thought they would make for nice display pieces if signed. All of those folks were super nice and fun to talk to. Bill Ratner (Flint) was especially chatty, and he even does the first two signatures for free! Guess he's not as hard up as a lot of the folks that go to these shows. I went ahead and got them personalized, which I don't normally do, but these characters and their voice actors definitely have some sentimental value for me.

Edited September 17, 2018 by F For Fake

[Parabellum]

Just arrived!  The top back corner of the city hunter box got a little crushed but other than that I’m quite happy.

[Buzzetta]

Umm... debating about buying this because I don't really use pencils...

This pencil sharpener looks like cobra Commander.   If I ever did buy it I would affix a cobra sigil on the top of it. 

[Buzzetta]

Also... at @comicwiz and others, the NYT had an interesting article about the breakdown of plastics in historical artifacts and attempts to preserve them.  I thought some of you would find it interesting.  If anyone that wants to read it, cannot view the NYT, I cut and pasted the article in the spoiler. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/science/plastics-preservation-getty.html

Spoiler

 

By XiaoZhi Lim

Aug. 28, 2018

126

LOS ANGELES — The custodians of Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit at the National Air and Space Museum saw it coming. A marvel of human engineering, the suit is made of 21 layers of various plastics: nylon, neoprene, Mylar, Dacron, Kapton and Teflon.

The rubbery neoprene layer would pose the biggest problem. Although invisible, buried deep between the other layers, the suit’s caretakers knew the neoprene would harden and become brittle with age, eventually making the suit stiff as a board. In January 2006, the Armstrong suit, a national treasure, was taken off display and stored to slow the degradation.

Of an estimated 8,300 million metric tons of plastic produced to date, roughly 60 percent is floating in the oceans or stuffed in landfills. Most of us want that plastic to disappear. But in museums, where objects are meant to last forever, plastics are failing the test of time.

“It breaks your heart,” said Malcolm Collum, chief conservator at the museum. The Armstrong suit’s deterioration was arrested in time. But in other spacesuits that are pieces of astronautical history, the neoprene became so brittle that it shattered into little pieces inside the layers, their rattling a brutal reminder of material failure.

Art is not spared either, as Georgina Rayner, a conservation scientist at Harvard Art Museums, showed at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting in Boston this month.

Claes Oldenburg’s “False Food Selection,” a wooden box containing plastic models of foods like eggs and bacon, a banana and an oatmeal cookie, now appears to be rotting. The egg whites are yellowing, while the banana has completely deflated.

In museums, the problem is becoming more apparent, Dr. Rayner said in an interview: “Plastics are reaching the end of their lifetimes kind of now.”

Of all materials, plastics are proving to be one of the most challenging for conservators. “I find plastics very frustrating,” said Mr. Collum. Because of the material’s unpredictability and the huge variation in forms of deterioration, he said, “it’s just a completely different world.”

“We have a very short history, in comparison to other materials, in understanding how long those materials last,” said Hugh Shockey, lead conservator at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Metal, stone, ceramic and paper have survived thousands of years, while plastics have existed for a little over 150 years. In that short time, however, they have risen to dominate the materials we use today. And plastics increasingly appear in art and artifacts nominated for preservation.

A walk through various Smithsonian Institution museums makes that clear. There’s the art, of course: acrylic paintings, a polyester parabolic lens with a mirror-like surface, a fiberglass sculpture of a middle-aged woman poised to dig into a melting banana split.

There are the triumphs of human ingenuity: the first artificial heart, Ella Fitzgerald’s LPs, the Apple I computer, a D-Tag device that helped researchers track and save endangered right whales.

And there are the mundane objects, the documentation of human life: an electric can opener, a pink Princess rotary telephone, Tupperware, a six-by-eight array of coffee cup lids, all with different designs.

“You have these objects in any museum collection, especially historic objects — they take you back to a time. But holding that moment in time in a material sense is tough,” said Odile Madden, a plastics conservation scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.

Dr. Madden leads a small group of scientists at the institute’s Modern and Contemporary Art Research Initiative, ModCon for short, who are working to help plastic live forever.

The first step for these conservators and others is to determine simply what the plastic is.

“We use this word as a monolith, ‘plastics,’ when in fact it’s many hundreds and thousands of different things,” said Gregory Bailey, a conservator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

“Plastic” simply refers to something moldable. Often, plastics are mixtures of polymers — big, long-chained molecules — and small-molecule additives. The earliest plastics were made from modified natural polymers like cellulose, but most plastics today are based on synthetic polymers that last much longer.

The additives may be so-called plasticizers that improve flexibility or fillers that strengthen the matter.

“There are opacifiers, pigments and sometimes even glitter,” Dr. Madden said. “You end up with an enormous number of possibilities for what a plastic composition could be.”

Perched on a hill, the views from the Getty institute stretch to the Pacific Ocean on a clear day. One afternoon, Anna Lagana, a conservator, rustled through a bin of plastic objects, some faded, others shattered.

The objects belonged to a reference collection donated to advance plastic conservation research at the institute. “This is all the drama,” she said.

She picked out a toothbrush split into two pieces at the middle. At its ends, the plastic handle was transparent, albeit yellowed. But near the breaks, the toothbrush is opaque, as if a cloud of white flowers had bloomed inside it.

Dr. Madden held the broken toothbrush under a microscope.

“The field started with very rudimentary physical tests, like a hot needle test” on a surface to see if the plastic melted, she said. “If it gave off some kind of smell, does it smell piney? Does it smell like burnt hair?”

Today, conservation scientists use advanced analytical techniques like microscopy or spectroscopy to identify materials.

Magnified, the white clouds in the toothbrush’s handle turned out to be an intricate system of cracks within cracks within cracks. Ms. Lagana and Dr. Madden immediately identified the plastic as cellulose nitrate, an early material widely used in photography and motion picture film.

The conservators had seen this type of damage many times before. “There is no other plastic that cracks in this way with this shape,” Ms. Lagana said.

Scientific analysis is usually accompanied by archival research. “We spend a lot of time studying the history of how these things are made,” said Dr. Madden. “If it’s a piece of Lego made before 1960, I’m expecting it will be cellulose acetate, not ABS.”

For objects with almost no information, a good technique to start with is spectroscopy, an analysis of how molecules interact with light.

Dr. Madden brought out a green-and-white striped vase and a small, red instrument. The instrument fires infrared light through materials, explained Michael Doutre, a ModCon scientist.

After absorbing infrared light, the bonds that connect different atoms within molecules will bend and stretch in distinctive ways, like signature dance moves. By examining the moves recorded on a graph, scientists can identify the type of bonds and try to infer what the molecules are.

Ms. Lagana holds the vase steady while Dr. Madden touches the tip of the spectrometer to it.

“For me, it’s polyethylene or it’s polypropylene,” said Ms. Lagana, a guess based on the feel and smell of the vase.

Mr. Doutre started the analysis on a computer, and a graph appeared on the screen. Ms. Lagana was right — the graph indicated nothing other than simple bonds between carbon and carbon atoms, and carbon and hydrogen atoms.

“In this case, the absence of things tells us it’s polyethylene,” Mr. Doutre said.

Dr. Madden pulled out what used to be a powder box, its cover now badly warped, cracked and covered in a layer of white powder.

“The plastic has lost some proportion of its mass,” she said, because its plasticizer had migrated to the surface and emerged as white powder. Without plasticizer, the box became brittle and shrank, and then finally cracked along its sides.

Shrinking and additive migration are two of the most common ways plastics degrade.

While in storage at the Smithsonian, curators found that a brown stain had appeared on the Armstrong suit’s left torso as plasticizer moved out of the air supply tubes, which were made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC).

That happens because the molecules within plastics are not arranged in the most efficient way, said Jane Lipson, a physical chemist at Dartmouth College.

They are like frozen disorganized liquids, containing a lot of empty, random gaps between molecules. Over time, the large polymer molecules will slowly reorganize and pack themselves more efficiently, which looks like shrinking to the naked eye.

Any small-molecule additives will work themselves out through the gaps until they reach the surface as a sticky liquid or a white powder. When plastics get warm, they degrade faster because the molecules have more energy to move around.

“They’re sort of finding their way to a place that’s more stable,” said Dr. Lipson.

Often, conservators just try to find the best conditions in which to maintain the artifacts. “Much of the conservation is how do we manage the storage or display environment to slow down the deterioration as much as possible,” said Mr. Bailey, of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

That may involve filtering out ultraviolet rays to decrease random breaking of plastic’s molecular bonds, a tall order for the museum (it has lots of windows). Preserving a plastic artwork also may mean keeping the temperature low and humidity stable to reduce plasticizer migration, or providing an oxygen-free environment to prevent oxidation.

Mr. Collum and his team are building a special display case for the Armstrong suit in carefully chosen conditions: 63 degrees Fahrenheit, 30 percent humidity, plus filters to remove contaminants. The conservators hope to have the display ready for next year’s 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

Even something as innocuous as cleaning an object for an exhibit can be a complex process. It seems easy enough to clear plasticizer from a surface, for instance, but cleaning prompts more plasticizer to emerge, effectively accelerating degradation.

“The plasticizer is actually trying to find equilibrium between the outside of the plastic and the inside of the plastic,” Mr. Shockey said. “But once you override the equilibrium, you can have a catastrophic event.”

Routine dusting can scratch a plastic’s soft surface, ruining a pristine, glossy finish. As an alternative, Mr. Shockey has pioneered a technique in which tiny microcrystals of dry ice or carbon dioxide “snow” are jetted over the surface to pick up dust and other contaminants.

Despite their notoriety as a major pollutant, plastics have important stories to tell.Even if we move away from plastics, Dr. Shockey said, “I think there’s still the need for persistence of memory in human culture.”

He recalled the story of tortoiseshell and its plastic doppelgänger, cellulose acetate. “We nearly hunted a particular turtle to extinction,” Dr. Shockey said, “and then we were able to turn away from the natural material to an alternative.”

“There’s a reason why we use them instead of the more traditional materials,” said Jeannette Garcia, a polymer chemist at IBM. For the most part plastics are cheap and versatile, lightweight yet strong.

Plastic bottles help transport clean drinking water to remote areas, lightweight composites help save energy in automobiles and planes, single-use sterile syringes and blood bags help extend lives. Prosthetics help replace failing body parts.

“We can outlive our bodies, thanks in part to plastic,” said Dr. Madden. Not to mention sending people into space.

 

 

Edited September 17, 2018 by Buzzetta

[Yorick]

1 hour ago, Buzzetta said:

Also... at @comicwiz and others, the NYT had an interesting article about the breakdown of plastics in historical artifacts and attempts to preserve them.  I thought some of you would find it interesting.  If anyone that wants to read it, cannot view the NYT, I cut and pasted the article in the spoiler. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/science/plastics-preservation-getty.html

  Reveal hidden contents

 

By XiaoZhi Lim

Aug. 28, 2018

126

LOS ANGELES — The custodians of Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit at the National Air and Space Museum saw it coming. A marvel of human engineering, the suit is made of 21 layers of various plastics: nylon, neoprene, Mylar, Dacron, Kapton and Teflon.

The rubbery neoprene layer would pose the biggest problem. Although invisible, buried deep between the other layers, the suit’s caretakers knew the neoprene would harden and become brittle with age, eventually making the suit stiff as a board. In January 2006, the Armstrong suit, a national treasure, was taken off display and stored to slow the degradation.

Of an estimated 8,300 million metric tons of plastic produced to date, roughly 60 percent is floating in the oceans or stuffed in landfills. Most of us want that plastic to disappear. But in museums, where objects are meant to last forever, plastics are failing the test of time.

“It breaks your heart,” said Malcolm Collum, chief conservator at the museum. The Armstrong suit’s deterioration was arrested in time. But in other spacesuits that are pieces of astronautical history, the neoprene became so brittle that it shattered into little pieces inside the layers, their rattling a brutal reminder of material failure.

Art is not spared either, as Georgina Rayner, a conservation scientist at Harvard Art Museums, showed at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting in Boston this month.

Claes Oldenburg’s “False Food Selection,” a wooden box containing plastic models of foods like eggs and bacon, a banana and an oatmeal cookie, now appears to be rotting. The egg whites are yellowing, while the banana has completely deflated.

In museums, the problem is becoming more apparent, Dr. Rayner said in an interview: “Plastics are reaching the end of their lifetimes kind of now.”

Of all materials, plastics are proving to be one of the most challenging for conservators. “I find plastics very frustrating,” said Mr. Collum. Because of the material’s unpredictability and the huge variation in forms of deterioration, he said, “it’s just a completely different world.”

“We have a very short history, in comparison to other materials, in understanding how long those materials last,” said Hugh Shockey, lead conservator at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Metal, stone, ceramic and paper have survived thousands of years, while plastics have existed for a little over 150 years. In that short time, however, they have risen to dominate the materials we use today. And plastics increasingly appear in art and artifacts nominated for preservation.

A walk through various Smithsonian Institution museums makes that clear. There’s the art, of course: acrylic paintings, a polyester parabolic lens with a mirror-like surface, a fiberglass sculpture of a middle-aged woman poised to dig into a melting banana split.

There are the triumphs of human ingenuity: the first artificial heart, Ella Fitzgerald’s LPs, the Apple I computer, a D-Tag device that helped researchers track and save endangered right whales.

And there are the mundane objects, the documentation of human life: an electric can opener, a pink Princess rotary telephone, Tupperware, a six-by-eight array of coffee cup lids, all with different designs.

“You have these objects in any museum collection, especially historic objects — they take you back to a time. But holding that moment in time in a material sense is tough,” said Odile Madden, a plastics conservation scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.

Dr. Madden leads a small group of scientists at the institute’s Modern and Contemporary Art Research Initiative, ModCon for short, who are working to help plastic live forever.

The first step for these conservators and others is to determine simply what the plastic is.

“We use this word as a monolith, ‘plastics,’ when in fact it’s many hundreds and thousands of different things,” said Gregory Bailey, a conservator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

“Plastic” simply refers to something moldable. Often, plastics are mixtures of polymers — big, long-chained molecules — and small-molecule additives. The earliest plastics were made from modified natural polymers like cellulose, but most plastics today are based on synthetic polymers that last much longer.

The additives may be so-called plasticizers that improve flexibility or fillers that strengthen the matter.

“There are opacifiers, pigments and sometimes even glitter,” Dr. Madden said. “You end up with an enormous number of possibilities for what a plastic composition could be.”

Perched on a hill, the views from the Getty institute stretch to the Pacific Ocean on a clear day. One afternoon, Anna Lagana, a conservator, rustled through a bin of plastic objects, some faded, others shattered.

The objects belonged to a reference collection donated to advance plastic conservation research at the institute. “This is all the drama,” she said.

She picked out a toothbrush split into two pieces at the middle. At its ends, the plastic handle was transparent, albeit yellowed. But near the breaks, the toothbrush is opaque, as if a cloud of white flowers had bloomed inside it.

Dr. Madden held the broken toothbrush under a microscope.

“The field started with very rudimentary physical tests, like a hot needle test” on a surface to see if the plastic melted, she said. “If it gave off some kind of smell, does it smell piney? Does it smell like burnt hair?”

Today, conservation scientists use advanced analytical techniques like microscopy or spectroscopy to identify materials.

Magnified, the white clouds in the toothbrush’s handle turned out to be an intricate system of cracks within cracks within cracks. Ms. Lagana and Dr. Madden immediately identified the plastic as cellulose nitrate, an early material widely used in photography and motion picture film.

The conservators had seen this type of damage many times before. “There is no other plastic that cracks in this way with this shape,” Ms. Lagana said.

Scientific analysis is usually accompanied by archival research. “We spend a lot of time studying the history of how these things are made,” said Dr. Madden. “If it’s a piece of Lego made before 1960, I’m expecting it will be cellulose acetate, not ABS.”

For objects with almost no information, a good technique to start with is spectroscopy, an analysis of how molecules interact with light.

Dr. Madden brought out a green-and-white striped vase and a small, red instrument. The instrument fires infrared light through materials, explained Michael Doutre, a ModCon scientist.

After absorbing infrared light, the bonds that connect different atoms within molecules will bend and stretch in distinctive ways, like signature dance moves. By examining the moves recorded on a graph, scientists can identify the type of bonds and try to infer what the molecules are.

Ms. Lagana holds the vase steady while Dr. Madden touches the tip of the spectrometer to it.

“For me, it’s polyethylene or it’s polypropylene,” said Ms. Lagana, a guess based on the feel and smell of the vase.

Mr. Doutre started the analysis on a computer, and a graph appeared on the screen. Ms. Lagana was right — the graph indicated nothing other than simple bonds between carbon and carbon atoms, and carbon and hydrogen atoms.

“In this case, the absence of things tells us it’s polyethylene,” Mr. Doutre said.

Dr. Madden pulled out what used to be a powder box, its cover now badly warped, cracked and covered in a layer of white powder.

“The plastic has lost some proportion of its mass,” she said, because its plasticizer had migrated to the surface and emerged as white powder. Without plasticizer, the box became brittle and shrank, and then finally cracked along its sides.

Shrinking and additive migration are two of the most common ways plastics degrade.

While in storage at the Smithsonian, curators found that a brown stain had appeared on the Armstrong suit’s left torso as plasticizer moved out of the air supply tubes, which were made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC).

That happens because the molecules within plastics are not arranged in the most efficient way, said Jane Lipson, a physical chemist at Dartmouth College.

They are like frozen disorganized liquids, containing a lot of empty, random gaps between molecules. Over time, the large polymer molecules will slowly reorganize and pack themselves more efficiently, which looks like shrinking to the naked eye.

Any small-molecule additives will work themselves out through the gaps until they reach the surface as a sticky liquid or a white powder. When plastics get warm, they degrade faster because the molecules have more energy to move around.

“They’re sort of finding their way to a place that’s more stable,” said Dr. Lipson.

Often, conservators just try to find the best conditions in which to maintain the artifacts. “Much of the conservation is how do we manage the storage or display environment to slow down the deterioration as much as possible,” said Mr. Bailey, of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

That may involve filtering out ultraviolet rays to decrease random breaking of plastic’s molecular bonds, a tall order for the museum (it has lots of windows). Preserving a plastic artwork also may mean keeping the temperature low and humidity stable to reduce plasticizer migration, or providing an oxygen-free environment to prevent oxidation.

Mr. Collum and his team are building a special display case for the Armstrong suit in carefully chosen conditions: 63 degrees Fahrenheit, 30 percent humidity, plus filters to remove contaminants. The conservators hope to have the display ready for next year’s 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

Even something as innocuous as cleaning an object for an exhibit can be a complex process. It seems easy enough to clear plasticizer from a surface, for instance, but cleaning prompts more plasticizer to emerge, effectively accelerating degradation.

“The plasticizer is actually trying to find equilibrium between the outside of the plastic and the inside of the plastic,” Mr. Shockey said. “But once you override the equilibrium, you can have a catastrophic event.”

Routine dusting can scratch a plastic’s soft surface, ruining a pristine, glossy finish. As an alternative, Mr. Shockey has pioneered a technique in which tiny microcrystals of dry ice or carbon dioxide “snow” are jetted over the surface to pick up dust and other contaminants.

Despite their notoriety as a major pollutant, plastics have important stories to tell.Even if we move away from plastics, Dr. Shockey said, “I think there’s still the need for persistence of memory in human culture.”

He recalled the story of tortoiseshell and its plastic doppelgänger, cellulose acetate. “We nearly hunted a particular turtle to extinction,” Dr. Shockey said, “and then we were able to turn away from the natural material to an alternative.”

“There’s a reason why we use them instead of the more traditional materials,” said Jeannette Garcia, a polymer chemist at IBM. For the most part plastics are cheap and versatile, lightweight yet strong.

Plastic bottles help transport clean drinking water to remote areas, lightweight composites help save energy in automobiles and planes, single-use sterile syringes and blood bags help extend lives. Prosthetics help replace failing body parts.

“We can outlive our bodies, thanks in part to plastic,” said Dr. Madden. Not to mention sending people into space.

 

 

That explains the "frosting" occurring on some of my sealed figures...  Science is fascinating!

[Buzzetta]

12 hours ago, Yorick said:

That explains the "frosting" occurring on some of my sealed figures...  Science is fascinating!

I think the most noticeable frosting I have seen over the years are on figures like Kenner Vintage Vader where the frosting is in sharp contrast against the black of the figure. 

Plastic in it's natural state is supposedly a whitish opaque color... or tan.  I wonder if certain dyes help to prevent degradation of plastic versus others or if we just do not take notice of some of these changes due to certain dyes masking the contrast of the degradation.  

 

[comicwiz]

1 hour ago, Buzzetta said:

I think the most noticeable frosting I have seen over the years are on figures like Kenner Vintage Vader where the frosting is in sharp contrast against the black of the figure. 

Plastic in it's natural state is supposedly a whitish opaque color... or tan.  I wonder if certain dyes help to prevent degradation of plastic versus others or if we just do not take notice of some of these changes due to certain dyes masking the contrast of the degradation.  

 

Frosting is one of those things that most people, when they notice it, mistake as mold. You are correct, it does show up better on black paint apps, or on black plastic shot figures. However, I've seen it on Ben (had a 12 Back with frosting in fact), Vader, DS Commander, Han, Chewie, and I'm sure I'm forgetting at least a few others. For some reason, they seem to be more prevalent with 12 Backs. The great thing about this article is it really starts to drive home the concept of material failure, and I myself have talked to people, explaining how "frosting could be cured", but in actual fact, all you are really doing is removing it on a sealed specimen to not make it appear unsightly, You aren't fixing the root cause of the problem that is forcing the plasticizer to migrate to the surface. The one thing I may have gotten right is I would explain it as the plastic "breaking down", because once that blending additive migrates to the surface, what we do know is happening for sure is the material composition is starting to breakdown. With precious metals, this happens when you are metling down gold or silver, and the impurities rise to the surface, but those compositions are becoming purer in a sense. When plasticizers are migrating to the surface of ABS, it begs the question, what is taking it's place when that compound is coming to the surface. I don't think we can conclude these figures are "shrinking" (which is one of the side effects the science indicates), but I can confirm that at the very least, the plastic is becoming brittle, and at the atomic or microscopic levels, we might be ble to see cracking/fracturing. Hard to convince someone they should open their sealed 12 Back though for science, so the only way we'll find out is when these things start breaking inside their blisters.

Apart from the frosting issue is the limb discoloration. Perhaps most prevelent with "green limbs" on Chewie, and Toltoys VCJ's (which has a spotted/blotching green effect). White figures like Leia and Stormtroopers start to turn pink. The "green/blue" discolouration on the Blue Snag's torso is another one. On the talking point of brittleness, I've read multiple instances where collectors accidentally dropped a Blue Snag (either in their display, or at a show) and the torso exploded into pieces, and the common thread those events shared is the green torso. One of the reasons why I'm particular about that particular figure as the material composition of limbs tends to be filled, not hollow, and has a rubbery, more durable characteristic. Torsos on the other hand are of a PVC grade, are hollow, and keep the entire figure together, so if those discolour, it's best to be careful and avoid dropping them.

Edited September 18, 2018 by comicwiz

[fantastic_four]

Never heard of frosting before.  The lead-in image on the video below illustrates it pretty well, looks like a Hoth gear Luke figure.

 

[comicwiz]

The incandesent bulb technique is similar to the method I used (and described in an old RS thread after I resolved some frosting on a Ben). The problem with this technique will become very evident once you have to deal with frosting on a caped figure. In such cases, it becomes a lot more complicated because the referring heat from the bulb will (believe it or not) reaching a melting point that could start to deform, or even discolour the cape (especially noticeable on a brown or tan cape). What I did is put the MOC in a soft case (Star Case) and used a magnifying glass to direct the light and target the frosting. One thing I have noticed over the years is in fact problems with capes which I believe were amateurly worked on to resolve frosting, but the person doing it had not known enough about the issue with the light melting the vinyl cape.

The outdoor, in direct sun remedy is definitely not something I would recommend.

[PKJ]

Changed up the loose figure stand, My original plan was to make two of these and set them back to back on a case or table in the middle of the room. One side Cobra the other Joes. I may still at some point but for now red white and blue. Left the top white to either do the GI Joe graphic or knowing is half the battle.Going to switch to clear bases.

 

 

Phillip

 

[followtheleader]

8 hours ago, PKJ said:

Changed up the loose figure stand, My original plan was to make two of these and set them back to back on a case or table in the middle of the room. One side Cobra the other Joes. I may still at some point but for now red white and blue. Left the top white to either do the GI Joe graphic or knowing is half the battle.Going to switch to clear bases.

 

 

Phillip

 

Man, you should spend a little of that toy money on your cars.  

Patrick

[PKJ]

15 hours ago, followtheleader said:

Man, you should spend a little of that toy money on your cars.  

Patrick

Patrick I keep telling my wife this!

[Yorick]

18 hours ago, followtheleader said:

Man, you should spend a little of that toy money on your cars.  

Patrick

NO.  It's ALL for toys!!