I’ve been working, abet horribly slowly, on two new fantasy horses to get my head back in the customizing game. Since I still haven’t replaced my epoxy, these are going to be simple customs and a good chance to work on the basics.

The Mini Whinny is from the Giant Box Of Doom (i.e. my body box from five years ago) but the stablemate is a relatively recent addition. I have a lot of critters in the body box, but since many of them are molds that Breyer has stopped making, I’m reluctant to ‘waste’ them.

Thus I splurged back in September on a box of the new Breyer G3 Stablemate molds (not so new anymore!) so I could get a feel for what my options were. Plus it’s a lot easier to attack something with a dremel if you know you can easily replace it for three bucks or less.

The new molds aren’t as appealing to me as the old G2’s (or even the G1’s), but I think that’s mostly because I’m used to working with them.

In order to temper my fears of ‘I’m going to mess this up!’ I picked the least interesting mold to start with… which was the standing Hanoverian. This guy has all the appeal of a cold hotdog, at least if my desperate searching for images of customized models is any indication.

I was trying to see what other folks had done to fix the ears, but since customs on this mold are few and far between I was stuck just putting dremel to plastic and hoping for the best.

Looking face on, the left ear wasn’t too hard to carve out. It’s more or less ear shaped and it was easy to add the touches of refinement to it (hollowing the inside, tapering the tips). This was the kind of ear I had been expecting to work with.

The left ear on the other hand… looks like a flattened banana.

I can’t find any other pictures of the mold online that show the bad ear well, so I’m not sure if this was a gradual deformation of the mold (i.e. it had looked like an ear to start with) or if this was a flaw from the very beginning. It looks like someone had grabbed the ear when it was soft and pulled it upwards– not an appealing look, even for a fantasy horse!

I attacked it as best I could with the dremel, first bringing down the overall length into something more ear-appropriate and then gradually adding shape by working both the outside and inside of the plastic chunk.

I was very careful to stop and primer the ear and take photos after every few minutes of work. The camera is much better at seeing details than I am, plus I could import the photos into Paint Shop Pro and play around to see what the next steps should be.

I think it turned out okay in the end, although the pictures below are a bit washed out. I won’t know for sure until the paint job is complete, but I think I may have salvaged the day– err, ears!

I am so not touching this mold again unilt I have some epoxy!