Tonight I would like to share one of the most amazing rebuilds I have ever seen to any Predator piece, and I just happen to be involved. If this would have happened to someone else, I would have just as easily handed the “best rebuild” award to them instead. The victim? A really ugly Cinemacast Predator I won off eBay. The cause? Idiotic packing methods from the seller. I’ll admit right off the bad though, had this statue arrived in pristine condition, I would still have been upset, because this statue is VERY ugly. For those of you out of the look on this statue, it’s a 90s solid cold cast porcelain Predator statue by Cinemacast that is essentially a modified Billiken 12″ Predator sculpt. It comes pre-painted, and therein lies the issue… the paint job is SO horrible, it actually makes the sculpt look like complete garbage, when in fact it does have some chance of looking like a nice piece.

So, what happened to this ugly duckling of a statue? Well, it comes in 3 pieces – a tree trunk base, the Predator, and the hand with the spear. The spear was well packed and survived the trip from California unscathed, but the seller decided one small sheet of bubblewrap between the base and the statue was all that was needed for adequate protection. When the FedEx guy handed me the box, I could actually here the pieces rattling together in the box and I knew I was screwed.

I carefully opened the box to a scene of horror. The legs and arms were smashed off the statue, his shoulder cannon broke off and was busted into 3 pieces, the back foot hole on the base was broken right off, there was chips all over the base and statue, toe nails were broken off and a factory defect left the spear warped. But what really sucked was that the face was destroyed! All four mandibles were missing and the small inner teeth were all broken and chipped. What a nightmare!! I was pretty pissed off, but I decided to try and save the piece, so during my lunch hour at work, I glued as many pieces as I could back together. To make matters worse, the porcelain has chipped around all the break areas, so I couldn’t glue anything cleanly together and the cracks were VERY obvious. I did however manage to find ONE mandible in the bottom of the box, but everything else has been pulverized by the statue pieces bouncing around in the box.

I started asking around on the forums for suggestions and generally the answer I got was “cut your losses and toss it in the garbage!”. I was pretty much ready to do it until a very talented member named Qenex posted his interest in trying to fix the statue. I had seen his work before when he made an ugly Kenner 10″ Predator look like a million bucks, so he got my immediate attention. Well we came to an agreement and I ended up shipping the Predator to him within a few days. Once he received it, more bad news.. the should cannon had snapped off again and this time, the helmet in his hand snapped in half, right across the eye lenses. This statue was DOOMED!

Well after many weeks of super hard work, Qenex completely rebuilt the face with HAND-MADE mandibles, built up broken areas, added real mesh and wires and turned this thing into the envy of anyone who looked at it. He even broke the spear in 3 places to get it straight again! I mean people with perfectly good Cinemacast Predator statues were seriously thinking of pitching them in the garbage or sending them to Qenex for similar treatment once they saw the potential.

The part that really convinced me this thing was cursed? Once the piece was finished and Qenex sent it to me with the most insane levels of precautions taken for shipping ANYTHING EVER, it came with two mandibles damaged AGAIN! How? I have no idea… so once again just the Predator was shipped back for another round of repairs. It was sent back a week later and arrived with slight damage AGAIN to one mandible, but it was within my ability to fix that and it was FINALLY finished. It had cost a fortune and my sanity, but eventually it made it to the display case.

So that’s the quick story of this amazing rebuild, so I’ll shut my yak now and let the photos do the talking! I have 3 sets of photos for you:

. DAMAGE
. IN PROGRESS
. FINISHED

Enjoy the pics guys!

Faken