Repairing Broken Breyer Horses

As a follow-up to my original post, I decided to attempt a repair of one of my broken Breyer horses. As you can read in the first part, I did not have a lot of success with this!

I went to the store and bought a fresh bottle of nail polish, and decided to try again. And again. All in all, I have made three attempts to repair Sagr's tail, with no success. When I scored the broken faces of the break, the nail polish remover did soften out the scores - but it did not soften the break enough that it could be smushed back together and hold.

Part of the problem may be that Sagr's tail poses an interesting engineering challenge. The weight of the tail is cantilevered out from the horse's body. There were a few times that I thought it would stick, but as soon as I let go, the tail fell off again.

Out of curiosity, I painted a fingernail, then tried removing the fingernail polish using the new bottle of nail polish remover. I was not surprised to find that it took quite a lot of remover to get the nail polish off there. And yet I remember that when I was a kid (20 years ago or more) nail polish came off with one swipe of the cotton ball.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that manufacturers have been diluting the acetone in their nail polish removers over the years. Why shouldn't they? Anyone removing nail polish won't have a problem with using a little bit more. And it's a lot cheaper to deliver half the amount of acetone for the same price.

At any rate, I'm going to say that nail polish remover is virtually useless for this kind of purpose. Proper acetone - the kind that you buy at a hardware store - will most likely work. But be careful when you're using it! The fumes are toxic, so be sure to work in a well-ventilated area. And be sure to apply only a tiny bit at a time.

Personally, since I have only one repairable broken Breyer horse, and no other conceivable use for a giant can of acetone, I'm going to give that experiment a pass.

No matter which repair method you try, I did find a number of people who mentioned that pinning the break is the best road to success. To pin the break, you drill a tiny hole on both sides of the break, then insert a small pin. The pin fits into both holes, and helps add more stability and strength to the repair. To be honest, I'm not sure how you're supposed to line up the hole properly - no one seems to mention that part! But I thought I would pass it along anyway.