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So I poorly planned a few of builds for my Skitarii, and I wanted to see if anyone has had luck in removing already glued heads?

What I want to do is convert some of my Arc rifle Vanguard into Arc rifle Rangers, but I’m wondering if it’s worth the effort since I used plastic cement and that’s a very permanent bond.

I’m thinking the only thing to do is try and carefully cut through the neck with my knife, and just hope for the best.

Anyone have any luck with this?

Plastic bonds are basically impossible to "break". They melt the plastic and then it cures again once the agent evaporates off. So the only way to break it is to cut/clip/slice/saw/sap the part off.

Honestly it might be easier to not try and modify them at the neck point; its always a fiddly area to get tools into and a very small high detail region of the model. You might find you do more damage than good trying to remove them.

Stick it in the freezer, it'll make the bond brittle and you can snap it off. Just be gentle with it.

 Tyranid Horde wrote:
Stick it in the freezer, it'll make the bond brittle and you can snap it off. Just be gentle with it.

This works with superglue because with a superglue bond the glue itself forms a layer between the two joined surfaces. This is why scoring the join area increases the grip of the join considerably because it dramatically increases the surface area of the join and also the variation in angles that the glue has to work with, thus providing a much tighter bond.

With plastic to plastic and plastic cements you don't need to score because the joining area is entirely melted until the glue cures, by which point the plastic basically reforms. So there's no joining layer or surface to become brittle.

I find all the poly cement joins I've made using the gw stuff have been super easy to break. I make stronger joins using pins and superglue, so give it a go..maybe the gw stuff just sucks, I don't know, but I'm not impressed with it.

I haven’t tried prying them apart, but I used Testors plastic cement. So far I’ve been pleased with the quality of hold, which in this case is unfortunate since now I’m trying to break it.

I find prying works only whilst the glue is still tacky or wet - once its set that's it the parts aren't coming off.

 Overread wrote:
I find prying works only whilst the glue is still tacky or wet - once its set that's it the parts aren't coming off.

This has been my experience so far as well. I think it’s either try to cut or just leave it alone and run these 3 Vanguard in a Killteam later.