Rebuilding an old model (part 2)

This model was bought through the net, and illustrates all the difficulties that must be overcome in going this route.

Received condition: The only paint was on the guy, gloppy black on the mask and boots and gloss white on the hat. The gun barrel was broken off and been glued on crooked. He was missing his spurs. The horse was missing a few pieces of the tackle, really only a couple of straps. The main difficulty was the poor fit in the assembly, the kid who built this didn't have or was not allowed to use a knife to trim any of the pieces. The horse was thus too big for the tackle to fit. I managed to remove everything but the saddle, the sucker was welded on. I managed to get the pieces of the horse pried apart and trimmed to proper fit anyway, then worked around it.

The other parts were just as bad, a pretty gloppy glue job. I discovered the hat was glued on backwards, I ran the exacto blade around the joint until it cut through. I'd have loved to remove the mask to make it easier to paint the face, but the Lone Ranger refused to take his mask off. OK, I worked around it. One stirrup was glued on backwards, cut that off and put it on right.

I made the missing pieces, filed down pieces of plastic "tree" into little straps, then heated them up and bent them to shape. A little carving and sanding, and they look original. Since I'm not a purist, I replaced the missing spurs with ones cut off a small cowboy action figure. Like anyone's gonna notice.

The paint job is covered on the Lone Ranger page, some additional info: the leather saddle is spice brown over black, with flat clear to give it that smooth look. I mixed blue-grey for the guy's outfit, used tan for the blanket roll on the saddle. I chose to make the base rocks red sandstone, and replaced a missing grass piece with one pinched from sculpty. In the end I now have a model I would otherwise have had to spend big bucks on, if I could have ever found one in box.

Click HERE to go to next page (rebuilding the Superboy).