Starsceam, Completed!

Well, almost.  I still need to get his cluster bombs, but I've been more of a fan of the longer missiles, so we'll see if I make that purchase.  After getting a little bolder with the peroxide solution whitening trick, I completely disassembled Starscream again.  I even managed to knock out the pin that holds the canopy to the rest of his body.  I practiced on an very old Thundercracker junker that I had laying around first to see if it worked and it did.  This had the added value of giving me the experience to tighten the canopies of my other seekers.

I think I may have left the solution out in the sun for too long, but I wanted to make sure that everything was the same shade since I had to purchase a few parts singly.  Even if he turned out a little lighter than he had originally was supposed to, I was pleased.  Here he is after I pulled him out of the solution and reassembled him.

I forgot to take pictures before I put a few labels on.

Robot mode

I finally got my shipment of decals in from Reprolabels.  I cleaned off Starscream again to make sure that there wasn't any accumulated dust or dirt on him and to take off any remaining sticker residue.  Labeling only took me a few minutes, which was shocking.  When I relabeled my Defensor, it seemed to take forever. 

This mold never gets old

This restoration wasn't completely problem free.  I realized after I had reassembled him that his nosecone was worse off that I thought, it looks like it's been chewed on and there's a tear in it.  That should be fixed in a few days when the junker body I ordered arrives for the custom Seeker I'm working on.  The second problem was that I couldn't get up the courage to fix the red paint on his chest.  Still, that's a minor concern for me.  I'm just happy that I resurrected a great figure that I wasn't even aware that I had. 

He's Getting Closer...

The eBay seller who sold me the long Starscream missiles that never arrived sent me replacements on Saturday and they arrived Monday. Unfortunately, they were yellowed. Fortunately, the seller gave me a refund and told me to keep the missiles. The project is getting closer to completion.

After removing all of his decals, I noticed that Starscream had yellowed considerably. It was really noticeable on the wings after the stickers came off. I could've just put the new decals on in the exact same positions that they were originally in on the wings, but even with tweezers, I'm not that precise. Two yellowed missiles and other parts?  That means one thing - peroxide!

I've never tried this trick before, but I've read about it. I'm super nervous about this. I hope that this works.

Here he is disassembled

 So I dumped all of that, minus the chest and nosecone into a glass baking dish, added the peroxide/oxi-clean solution, covered it in plastic wrap, and put it out in my front yard in the sunniest place I could find.  There was only one problem:

That was as sunny as it got

We've experienced a lot of stormy weather where I live over the last week, so it's been difficult to get any kind of sun for any length of time.  That coupled with the fact that I was extremely worried about this screwing up parts, I didn't make the solution very strong.  As a result, the yellowing improved some, but not enough.  The weather should improve next week, so I'll try again with a full strength solution.  I just got the launchers in, so by the time I get Starscream completely clean, my decals from Reprolabels should be in.

Still yellow