OK, so you’ve accidentally broken the neck ball off of a figure and you want to repair it… well here’s how I do it.

Below are most of the tools you need. I forgot to put needle-nosed pliers in the picture, but you will need them! The screw is about the same size as a leg screw only a little longer. I believe this one came out of a cassette tape. The drill bit is 5/64”








Here is the underside of poor lifeline’s head. As you can see the neck ball is broken off inside:





Step One:
Drill a hole in the neck ball about half the depth of the screw. Try to drill the hole in the center of the ball.





Step Two:
Screw the screw into the neck ball





Step Three:
Using needle-nosed pliers to grab the screw and your fingers to hold the head, pull the neck ball out of the head.





Step Four:
Snip the head off of the screw. Do this with a pair of dikes and cut as close to the head of the screw as possible. You want to leave as much of the threaded shaft as possible.




As you cut the screw head off do it under a cover as pictured below in order to avoid the parts shooting off and being lost.




As you can see below, I drilled too deep into the ball and did not leave much of the threaded shaft of the screw exposed, but it is still enough to do the job:





Step whatever number was next:
Drill a hole into the neck. Try to center the hole.





Step six hundred fifty-two:
Put a drop of super glue inside the neck hole





Step Seven:
Screw the neck ball into the hole in the neck. Use needle-nosed pliers to makes sure it is tightened down as flush as you can gently and reasonably get it.





Step Eight:
Apply a thin bead of super glue around the neck where the ball makes contact. This is just to seal it up and make sure it does not come loose. Wipe off any excess.





Step Nine:
*IMPORTANT!* Make sure the glue bead is completely dry before you put the head back on!!! Then, well… put the head back on… and tada! Yer done!




He still has his full range of motion! YAY!!!!




Now quit reading this and go customize something!

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Nice tutorial, i broke the neck ball of my hobbit figure and this is a perfect solution.

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Thanks for the tutorial!

especially taking the time to photograph all your steps!

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Excellent tutorial. Thanks for sharing.

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Do you mind if we add this to the wiki?

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Please do.

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im glad this has never happened to me, but great fix.

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Done. http://wiki.joecustoms.com/wiki/Modern_ ... r_Tutorial

Great tutorial. Quick and fun.

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Thanks! I actually broke the ball off of that Wet-Suit custom I posted last night. That's what caused me to devise a way to fix the problem. Previously I had broken Lifeline and just glued the ball back on, knowing that I was losing articulation. When the repair worked so well for Wet-Suit I decided to fix Lifeline and did the tutorial as I went along.

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I never even found a Lifeline in the wild and you break the head off of yours...

This tutorial is really well down. Kudos for thinking outside the box to come up with a viable solution to repair broken figures.

If I found two Lifelines, I wanted to make the mail away version. Plus the head is perfect for a General Flagg custom.

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I've done a similar type of repair - drill the ball out of the head socket, then add a post to it, to anchor it back onto the neck. But never in a million years would have come up with the use of the screw AS the anchor to secure it back on. Makes the entire process easier, and makes for a near permanent fix, I'd suspect. Bravo.

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Well, there's a reason why this happened... you see I had ordered a cast of the Lifeline head from Broken Arrow Toys to make a Pathfinder custom, and in the long wait to get the head I found a Lifeline at TRU. I wanted to keep the Lifeline, but I still wanted to go ahead and make Pathfinder, so I used Lifeline's head for Pathfinder and when I finally received the cast I painted it up for Lifeline. Well, the cast did not fit the ball like the original head. I had to dremel it out some. I did not dremel it out quite enough, and when I went to remove the head to do so... the ball snapped off. I kicked myself for a while after that. When I made this tutorial I finished dremeling the head.

Also if you want a cast of the Lifeline head Raginspoon sells them.

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