Hey y'all. Meet Summer.
Summer is part of the Barbie Fashionistas line. Here's how she'd look in the store.
This Summer, however, has been through quite a lot. I found her torso on the ground while passing a park by my house. Her arms were still attached, but her legs and head had been twisted off.
Little t told me he'd seen her inside the park a day earlier, and she was whole, but nude. He wanted to pick her up but he thought she belonged to a kid living nearby, so he left her there.
We went back to the park and, after hunting around for a little bit, found both her legs and her head, and brought her home in pieces.
Both of Summer's knees had been snapped off at the hip, and the knees twisted in circles and pulled. The plastic at the knee joint had suffered pretty intensive damage. The right hip-joint knob was still attached to the torso, so I was able to just snap her right leg back on. For the knees, I boiled a pot of water, bent the legs at the knee, and dipped only the knee area for about ten seconds at a time, then pressed the socket in towards the thigh until the plastic gradually receded. Her knees are still in bad shape and one leg juts out further than the other, so she has some trouble balancing.
Her torso casing suffered minor damage and is partially split at the hip only on the left side. Because the left hip-joint knob was missing, I had to use a short drywall screw to re-attach her left leg. It moves front to back and has limited outward movement, but a bit more effort is required to get it in action.
Pardon me for blasting your eyeballs with plastic boobs, but I wanted to show the damage. I could sand down the divots or possibly use the boiling water treatment to coax the divots closer to their original place, but I chose to leave them since they're more cosmetic damage than structural.
Summer's been restored with minimal effort, and is now the new friend of little t.
There's very little that I can do to help people who have suffered attacks like this, but I can fix plastic. Or at least I can try.
Have you ever restored a broken doll? What has your experience been like?
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