I've never been happy with Playmates' 4.5" Captain Pike figure. The body looks terrible. The torso is actually pretty good, but the arms are too short, and the legs... oh well. 

Another thing about the figure that bothers me is the head sculpt. It's not terrible, but it does look more like Jeffrey Hunter's stand-in or like Sean Kenney, who played Pike in a wheelchair in The Menagerie, Parts 1 & 2 besides appearing as Lt. DePaul in Arena and A Taste of the Armageddon. Which is cool if you want to make a Lt. DePaul custom.

After coping so long with the mediocre head sculpt, I've finally decided to do something about it, and to re-work the whole figure as well. I bought a 12" Pike figure, also by Playmates, because I like this head sculpt best of all the Pike figures out there. They really nailed the likeness with this sculpt. I made a mould of his head and again used Hydroshrink to... well... shrink the head. On this picture, you can see a comparison of the 12" head, the Hydroshrink head in its current size (it'll shrink some more, but not much; I'll have to make another mould and pour some Hydroshrink to make it even smaller) and the original 4.5" head. Once the casting made from Hydroshrink will reach its desired size, I'll make a master mould (or probably a few) and make various copies with resin. Then I can make the regular uniform Pike, the landing party jacket Pike etc.

I have already started working on the new body for Pike (as well as the landing party version), but it needs a repaint, so I have no pictures to share, yet.

Again, only a comparison shot, but here you have all the ingredients necessary for a 4.5" Archer figure Daysleeper-style. 

The head comes from the Art Asylum Archer figure, the tall guy in the back. Hydroshrink made it possible to have the head sculpt (Archer's is one of the best sculpts by Art Asylum/Diamond Select, if you ask me) in my preferred 4.5" scale. As you can see, he's holding another (unfinished) copy of the head in the smaller scale.

As for the body, I used a SeaQuest Ford figure which was sanded and heavily resculpted using Apoxie. I've seen people using the same body like it is, just giving it a repaint. But I wanted the figures to be as accurate as possible, so I took the time and resculpted the pockets and most of the zippers. Takes a lot of time and practice, but looks pretty cool in the end.

This figure of Admiral Kirk in the short-sleeved uniform he was wearing in The Motion Picture was a commission for a guy I met on Facebook. He had seen a picture of my TMP-Kirk custom and wanted to have one for himself, too.

While in the process of building the figure, I decided to take a picture of the base figure that was used for most of Kirk's body, namely the McCoy figure from the same movie, together with the pieces for the custom after sanding and sculpting and my finished version for comparison.

I used the arms of a TOS bridge Kirk, as I wanted to have some variety of limbs when displaying the figures next to each other. Well, and I had already used the McCoy-arms for another custom. I had some spare Kirk-arms lying around, so I used them and sanded the sleeves and smoothed them down as good as possible. I also resculpted the collar, the ring around the new short sleeves and Kirk's hair. 

As my shrunken version of the 12" Pike head isn't finished, yet, I'll show you this figure here as "work in progress": Captain Christopher Pike, sporting the landing party jacket from The Cage.

The torso is from a Picard in jacket figure, the arms swapped with Tuvok's at the biceps swivel (Picard in captain's vest from First Contact is the donor of the arms as well recipient of the original figure's arms). Head and legs are from a regular Pike figure, although I will replace the head with my shrunken down version once it is good to go.

I will make a Spock-figure using the same recipe (except for the head, of course) some time soon.