I saw that my Friendly Local Game Store had a few of Reaper's new "Bones" line in stock, and I was curious to see how well they'd hold up to conversion.
Well, my answer? YES, they do, but I can't expect the same techniques to work well for these as they do with pewter or hard plastic. The Bones plastic is BENDY. In fact, I really can't understand why they chose "Skeletal Spearmen" as one of their offerings. (Skeletons? YES. But those spears beg for conversion because the bendy nature of the plastic makes them look silly.)
Now, if I actually wanted these skeletal spearmen to be skeletal spearmen, the first thing I'd do is snip off the spears (that part is practically effortless with a hobby knife -- you could cut this plastic with ordinary scissors, though I wouldn't recommend it), drill a hole through the hand (that's the hard part, with the "bendy" nature of the plastic), then run a piece of wire through as a new spear shaft and stick the plastic spear-tip back on the top. Voila. Or, at least, that's my hope.
However, I didn't want a bunch of plastic spearmen. Rather, I was hoping these plastic skellies would be viable modern in-production alternatives to the old Games Workshop "Skeleton Army" pieces (which were great for "generic" skeletons you could decorate dungeons and graveyards with ... but, not so great for assembling an army, which is probably why they were replaced with sturdier, chunkier, slightly-less-easily-customized skeleton models later on).
The middle skeleton in the picture is probably the best of my experiments here. I'll call him "Lefty." I snipped off the spear, then used a pinning drill to make a hole in the hand and on the right leg, exploited the "bendy" nature of the plastic to rotate the arm downward, and glued it in place with a piece of wire attaching it. One downside of the sculpt is that the original spearmen were holding shields that press up against the left side of the ribcage -- meaning that although it's very easy to trim away the plastic shield (and still have a shield left over for a later conversion), you're going to end up with a section of ribcage without details. This plastic is easy to cut, but not to carve (too bendy/flexible), so I couldn't just fake it by carving in new rib details very easily. I ended up covering it up with a noose from a Warhammer Flagellants pack. The gun and hand are from Reaper 59026 "Deadlands Weapons & Accessories" pack; the replacement arm is just a piece wire pinned to the shoulder, with a bit of putty on it.
The right and left skeletons were tougher, because my "bright" idea was to snip off the spear, hand and all, and then "pin" on a new weapon & hand. The trouble is two-fold: First, it's pretty hard to drill a hole into a very thin limb, and these skeletons have very thin limbs. Secondly, it's even harder when it's BENDY PLASTIC. D'oh. My attempts ended up shredding or distorting the plastic. It was technically doable, but if I had it to do over, I would just leave the hand intact, and carefully trim off a gun (sans hand/handle) to stick on top of it. Either that, or just make a new right arm with wire and putty, and be done with it.
I didn't stick nooses on the whole gang (though I suppose it could've made sense -- I might change my mind and go back and add a couple more later), but I tried to disguise the lack of detail on the rib-cage left side by painting in flecks of brown and black to suggest that there might be scraps of cloth (or something) still hanging off the bones. If I were serious about it, I'd break out the green stuff and add some scraps, but this was meant to be just a quickie conversion. Now these guys can pad out my Deadlands "Undead Outlaw" gang.
Anyway, my take-away:
1) The Bones plastics are cheap compared to pewter, no doubt about it, and they hold up well to spray-painting base coats (as I'd hope).
2) There are lots of possibilities for conversion, but the methods are a little different than with pewter or hard plastic. For instance, the best way to make a pinning hole in this plastic is just to PUNCH the plastic, rather than drilling (which twists up and shreds the plastic). I found that a dental pick works well for this. You can use a pinning drill, but it's more fiddly, and it works best on a larger mass of the plastic as opposed to fiddly bits such as skeleton limbs.
I feel like the Bones line really needed some skeletons, but I'm not so sure these were the best particular figures to be in the line. In a perfect world, I'd think Reaper P06001A - "Skeleton with Two Swords" - would be perfect. You want a skeleton with sword-and-shield? Just snip off one sword (pick which one you want, for variety!) and glue on a shield instead. Want a skeleton holding a two-hander? Snip off both swords, get him a new, longer blade, bend the hands around and pin them together to hold the new sword. Just want a skeleton to decorate a graveyard? Snip off both swords and remove him from the base and position where you please. Basically, you could exploit the "bendy" nature of the plastic to reposition the arms to hold new weapons, and since the base pose has hands away from the body, you get the maximum potential for conversion. I realize that's too little, too late (they've already invested in the mold to churn out 77001), but I think it'd be a great choice if they do so well with the Bones line that they decide to add ANOTHER skeleton pose.
The spears really bring out the worst of the "bendy plastic" properties, and were visibly warped in the blister pack. Also, the shields being pressed up on the rib-cage detracted from the possibilities in converting these figures; if only the shields had been separate pieces I could have had the option to GLUE on, that would have been perfect, and I could have forgiven the bendy spears because I could easily replace them with some other weapon. Of course, I realize it's a bit too late to do anything about it NOW; that's just how it goes.
I plan on doing some more Bones conversions, to see what I can get out of them, although I don't see this particular plastic as "the way of the future." Despite my frustration with the hand-swaps on the skeletons, I can see there are other methods that can work better -- I just need to experiment more -- and I appreciate that Reaper has provided a cheaper option to work with.
