Obitsu Yu Sekiya lose arm/joint repair

I don't think the "repair process" was interesting enough to warrant photos, but I thought I'd share this information here, on the off-chance it helps anyone else!

Awhile back I bought a 1/6 Obitsu Yu Sekiya secondhand on instagram for a very, very good price. When the seller shipped her, they shipped her in one of my most disliked ways to ship dolls... in a bubble mailer. She's so small, I think she could have easily fit in most boxes before even being dissembled if it had to come to that to ship her, but... I digress. I've had a lot of secondhand dolls and other doll-stuff shipped to me in a lot of *ahem* creative ways, so I probably should have made sure she was being shipped in a box... Hindsight is 20/20, as they say. 😣

When she arrived there was some issues with her, but considering I bought her for a  extremely good price, I didn't bring it up and complain about anything. However, one of the most frustrating issues with her is that her arm kept popping out of joint - not the shoulder joint into the torso, but the shoulder joint you use to help twist and rotate the arm. Looking inside of the arm, there was a part of the inner hole that wasn't quite... circular? I think when she was in the bubble wrap, the arm may have gotten pummeled enough that it 'stretched' the plastic. Thankfully the force wasn't enough to break anything, though...

I know plastics can have a bit of a "heat memory." I know you can boil resin to help with dents, and this is a technique I even used for some pvc figures that were slightly deformed, so I figured... why not? If this didn't work, I was going to try either some white plumbing tape (often used in pullip-obitsu hybrids to help secure the head) or maybe some hot glue sueding to see if that would be able to 'tighten' up the joint. 

Last night, I got some water to a rolling bubble and took the arm apart and nestled it into one of my kitchen utensils and did... numerous dips. I also did some dips after assembling the arm back together. I didn't really do it a specific amount of times, I just made sure to keep each dip at about ~10 seconds or so, and to keep it moving in the water, since I am not sure what the melting point of obitsu's plastic was, nor did I intend to find out!

And... for final results? Well, it wasn't been too long yet, but so far it seems that the arm is a lot tighter than it used to be, so I assume it worked, at least to some degree! I am still prepared to use the other methods if it comes to it, but for right now, I consider this a tentative success! 😊

Edited June 13, 2022 by Epona