Doll eating bugs!

 A warning! This post contains graphic pictures of nasty bugs and munched dolls!

This lovely mechanical toy has 4 little bisque head dolls with composition bodies sitting on swings. It is a simple mechanism that when wound, rotates the dolls on their swings.

The dolls have become floppy and no longer sit upright on their swings.

One has even gotten so floppy she has become prone.

This one has quite the tilt.

The dolls are mounted on the swings by a metal spike going up into their torso.

The first doll has been removed from her spike leaving a little pile of sawdust.

Her leg has been reattached with Scotch tape.

Time to peel off the tape and find out what is going on with her body.

Her clothes were sewn on so a few stitches had to be snipped to remove them and expose her torso.

The first sign of trouble are some little holes in the outfit.

Then, with some more manipulations of the doll, a couple live bugs drop out. That would be the two larger specks near the top of this picture.

The bugs are immediately sealed in a jar and the dolls are sealed in a plastic bin.

What bugs are these?

I have poked at old dolls for over 40 years and have never found a live bug in one!

But, I have done most of my old doll poking in Canada and now I am in Florida. Are there different pests here?

My science background means I just happen to have a digital microscope handy.

So, here is one of the culprits.

This is his underside for everyone's enjoyment.

This bug is Lasioderma serricorne, commonly called the cigarette beetle.

It is quite fond of munching on tobacco products but is not too picky. It will also dine on a wide variety of materials including stored foods, furniture stuffing, bookbinding paste and papier mache.

It is a semitropical/tropical bug which means it dies when the temperature gets too cold. This might explain why I never met one in Canada? It also means that popping the infested item in the freezer will kill all this bug's stages. Fortunately the dolls are small and freezing them should not be harmful.

The dolls get wrapped in tissue and sealed in Tupperware and then start their 1 week chilly quarantine.

After doing their time in the freezer and then warming up again, the dolls get inspected further.

This is doll number one with multiple bore holes through her torso. The top of one leg is missing.

The two bigger dots on the paper towel are another two beetles that fell out of her torso. They are quite dead.

There has been a previous repair on one arm. That pink stuff is a type of putty. These dolls do not have their factory original stringing so likely the pink putty was applied during the previous restringing.

The beetles munched a bit on the legs too.

One of the holes in the torso is not quite empty. Fortunately this beetle is also dead. A few pokes with a pin and his bits are extracted.

Every hole gets inspected with my microscope and a fine wire probe to make sure all the bug bits are gone.

A syringe containing wood glue will be used next to inject glue into every hole.

Once the glue dries I can fill defects and rebuild missing bits with epoxy putty. I will even replace the old pink repair putty with new, less flamboyantly coloured putty.

Doll #1 is back together.

Doll # 2 was the floppiest doll and, on first glance, doesn't look too bad.

But, the bottom of her torso is missing. Could the beetles have caused that damage?

She too gets any suspicious hole injected with glue and then gets rebuilt with epoxy putty.

Doll # 3 has some bore holes in her torso but isn't too bad.

Doll #4 has issues with the bottom of her torso.

She had had matchsticks stuffed into defects in the torso to keep her on the swing.

Once the matchsticks are removed you can see that her torso has disintegrated at the lower end. There a few suspicious bore holes. The dark flecks in the backround are not bugs. They are bits of hardened elastic.

Here is her torso rebuilt with epoxy putty.

The little hole is where the spike inserts to hold her on the swing.

Finally the dolls are redressed and mounted securely on their swings.

A Schoenhut doll's popping paint.

 

This lovely Schoenhut girl is troubled by paint issues commonly termed 'paint popping'.

It is a complex problem that has no definate single cause. 

Aging wood covered by gesso and then painted with oil based paint is not 100% stable. All these layers do deteriorate with time. Temperature and humidity changes will also alter the wood and the overlying layers. All these factors lead to failures of adherence.

This paint is lifting and about to fall off.

Some paint has already fallen off.

Do you consolidate the troubled paint? That means applying adhesive compounds to slow down the failures. She would remain wrinkled but hopefully the paint loss would slow down.

Or, do you remove the failing paint and fill/repaint the defects?

This doll's owner has opted for the latter.

It doesn't take much poking for the loosened paint to fall off.

After sealing the bare wood areas, some filler can be applied.

Then some paint to disguise the repaired areas.

A Schoenhut boy

 

This carved hair Schoenhut boy has arrived to get his face improved upon.

He has had a few makeovers over the years as there is evidence of several layers of paint and topcoats on him.

You can see a strawberry blond hair colour under the dark brown. Maybe that was his original hair colour?

A UV light shows more details of his multiple makeovers.

So, I start removing the layers.....

This is what is left of his original paint.

A view from the back.

A bit of paint is needed to fill in the many open areas.