Adventures in Acetone

 Last Year, around Xmas, I got into kit bashing and scratch building figurines. My goal was really just to keep everything super cheap... if I was buying green stuff for 20 bucks, it just wasn't worth it.  Eventually I stumbled on some potential game changers: oyumaru and sprue goo.  With these, in theory, I could recast figurines infinitely for pennies.  As usual, I gave myself a deep dive into Youtube for an education and started to experiment.  The first experiment was an utter failure.  I bought dollar store nail polish remover and used spare plastic minis (because I didn't have any actual sprues).

I soaked them for days and nothing happened.  Eventually I figured out that the dollar store nail polish remover was more water than acetone and wasn't strong enough, so I bought this...

Success was just around the corner ... except it wasn't. This didn't do anything, either.  I was frustrated and considered giving up, having spent ten bucks on useless acetone.  Then I thought I'd try another experiment and put Styrofoam into the acetone  ... and it worked! The resultant goop was not very easy to work with, but it had a couple of good points.  It didn't stick to my fingers and it didn't stick to the oyumaru.

I found a few immediate uses for it, including as a medium for basing.  

It is also possible to recast this stuff if you are patient and let it dry for about 2 days. In the photo below, the legs and one arm are done with melted Styrofoam goop, and the rest is with thermoplastic (which is much easier to use, but still limited in other ways).