Review of Elfin's re-issue of Halcyon's 1:1 Facehugger.

I picked this kit up at one of the fairs a while back as it was fairly cheap and it is a kit I have been after for some time. You get a cardboard box with a picture of a finished kit on it and inside the 14 pieces of facehugger and two sheets of instructions. One sheet looks suspiciously like a photocopy of the original kit instructions and the other is a fairly basic sheet of general how to put vinyl kits together tips.
The parts are in thick fairly soft vinyl with good surface detail and few noticeable flaws. The "fingers" and tail sections were OK but the two body parts were very badly warped and there was no way they were going to fit together without lots of encouragement. After the usual softening and trimming, I had some success in straightening up the body parts with heating and dumping in cold water. At this point I realised that the "fingers" would not fit into the sockets on the upper body without a lot of heating and brute force. A funnel-like piece on each "finger" fits through the corresponding hole in the body and keeps the parts together. I attached all ten parts and once they were in place the fit was sufficiently snug that I didn't really need to use any glue. Then came the fun job of trying to get the two main parts to fit together. I used the "start at one corner and work along" method, using gap-filling superglue and accelerator, heating the vinyl with a hair dryer as I went along to get the pieces together. It took a fair bit of time but actually came out pretty well. I just needed to work on a few gaps with Milliput.
I decided that the kit needed some sort of filling and given that using Plaster of Paris would have made the thing weigh a ton, I used expanding foam insulation. This stuff proved pretty nightmarish to use as it is extremely sticky and seems to get everywhere except inside the kit cavities. I sprayed it into the various parts and left it to cure. When I came back the next day there were long tendrils of foam emerging from various holes which had to be trimmed off and the core of foam had not set properly and continued to expand. In all it took about three days to finally set and let me glue the kit together. I inserted some lengths of wire coat hanger between the tail sections to strengthen the joints.

The whole kit was given a thorough wash and sprayed with Halfords Grey Primer. A few air holes showed up at this point and were filled with Milliput. I then gave the whole thing a coat of Halfords VW Pastel White and the "mouth" section a coat of Ford Ivory to give me the basic colour scheme for detailing. I mixed 50/50 raw umber and burnt sienna, thinned it down and airbrushed it on as a wash. As I painted an area I immediately rubbed most of the paint off leaving the brown in the crevices. A darker version of the mix was brushed around the nails and a paler version used on the nails themselves. Once all that had dried, I mixed white with just a touch of the shading wash and gently sprayed some highlights; as the kit is 1:1 there is less need for shading than usual. I used a paler version of the nail colour to highlight them and sealed them with semi gloss varnish.

The "mouth" was painted with a mix of white, red and brown to give a more pinky, flesh tone with a darker red in the crevices. I gave the whole area a coat of pink to tie the colours together and punch in the highlights. Once it was dry I gave the area several thick coats of Klear floor polish (Klear is the UK version of Future) and the beast was finished.
All in all I'm fairly pleased with the result, though finding space to display it is proving a problem. Linda won't let me have it suspended over the door.

Gary Stratmann

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