How to Use Custom Action Figure Parts

by Glenn Webb

Customizing your action figures is a fairly new but popular hobby that allows you to create your own unique action figure from new or by resurrecting your old figuresthat had been consigned to the bin!

In this easy to follow tutorial and video Glenn walks you through the process of creating your own Custom Action Figure parts.

So why am I doing this?

 Well, by the time I finished I’m going to end up with an Ultimate Warrior figure that’s going to be an Elite articulated the one that doesn’t have the horrible limited articulated T-jointed hips, plus it’s going to have chest articulation.

But what I’m about to show you isn’t just about converting a basic figure into an elite articulated one, it’s also just a general body parts swapping tutorial so if you just wanted to swap one action figure’s head for another, this is how you’re going to go about it.

And for it, you’ll be requiring a hair dryer so let’s fire this bad boy up.

Apply the heat to the neck joint for about 3 minutes and the head should pop right off. If you’ve heated the figure enough it should pop off quite easily but iIf you feel like you are forcing it, apply more heat. Be patient. And try again.

So here we have them. I’ve fully dismembered both action figures and hopefully the various parts will still be hot enough from being heated that I’ll be able to directly swap the parts. If not, I’ll need to heat them some more. So let’s kick it off with the Ultimate Warrior’s head. Let’s attach that to the Batista body. OK, good. Now let’s do the Ultimate Warrior’s left arm.

Next we need to attach the knees and lower legs and these have a peg in them. This needs to thread into either side of the upper knee on the Batista figure.I’m going to go ahead and heat up the upper knee on the Batista legs. It should need to much, ok let’s see if that is enough.

So that’s all there is to it, now we have an elite articulate figure.

Thanks to the body swapping body more movement to the hips and of course we now have the chest joint.

But you’re probably wondering what about Batista’s trunks and tattoos, how do we go about getting rid of those?

The first thing we need to do is sand away the tattoos from his shoulders, belly and his and then paint over those areas.

You could paint directly over the tattoos without sanding them away but I prefer to sand them away. It gives the surface that much more grip for the paint and then the paint tends not to chip off so easily when he bumps up against other action figures.

One of the most common question I get ask about customizing is: What paints do I use?

Well, I use Citadel paints by the Games Workshop. They do various skin tone colors and you may get lucky and find a paint straight out of the pot that matches the figure perfectly, or you may need to add a little bit of white, a little bit of red, a little bit of black, etc.

I used Cadian Fleshtone which seemed a decent match, so that’s all him paintedl, front and back. Then I apply the green paint I’ve mixed for his trunks. And voila!

The Workbench

Custom Action Figure Heads