The paint on the figure is the factory's work; the case is yours. What a buyer sees first is the seam — a bubble in the joint or a white bloom along an edge makes even a good figure look cheap. On this work the process that matters is polishing and bonding, not cutting.
When a display case fails, it fails in one of these four places.
Too much solvent draws a white bloom out of the material — the most common way this goes wrong. We polish the mating edges, dispense a measured amount, clamp, and leave a full 24 hours before release. Unclamping early is what shifts the joint and hazes it.
Display pieces sit under close spotlights, and standard sheet starts to yellow at about six months — most visible on a white figure. Display work gets UV-stabilised cast throughout. It costs 20–30% more and still matches after two years.
Untreated inside edges leave marks after a few insertions, especially on matte finishes. Rounding the interior edges, lining with felt or adding corner pads does more than thicker sheet.
One-piece cases break at the corners, almost without exception. Splitting into base plus cover with EPE location between them brings the damage rate under 1%.
Printing, foil, engraving and bonding all run in-house. Series and process detail sit on the Retail & display page.
Collectors look at a display case the way a jeweller looks at a stone: the first thing they see is the flaw. That makes this sector unusual, because the acceptance criterion is not a dimension but an absence — no visible seam, no bloom, no yellowing, no interior edge that can mark a paint job.
Invisible joints are a sequence, not a product. The joint is planned onto a corner or a shadow line rather than a face, because a seam in grazing light will always read regardless of quality. The bond is solvent — dichloromethane with a small acetic acid addition — applied by capillary so the joint is a molecular weld rather than a glue line. After cure the squeeze-out is scraped at 90 degrees and the corner is polished as one continuous edge, so the two faces become one surface.
White bloom in a joint is entrapped solvent or moisture escaping over days, and it has three causes: too much solvent, too fast a bond, or bonding sheet that was never dried after storage. The fix is process discipline — sheet acclimatised for 24 hours in the workshop, solvent applied by capillary so the joint fills from the bottom, and a 24-hour cure before any polishing. A joint that looks perfect on the bench and blooms on the shelf was bonded too wet.
Standard cast acrylic under retail LED lighting will shift measurably in three to five years; a UV-stabilised grade pushes that out to seven to ten. No acrylic is permanently colour-stable, and a supplier who promises otherwise has not tested it. Where a collectible is high value and lit continuously, we specify UV-stabilised sheet and recommend a low-UV LED with the case rather than arguing about the sheet alone.
| Failure | Cause | Prevention |
|---|---|---|
| White bloom in the joint | Wet bond or excess solvent | 24 h sheet acclimatisation, capillary application, 24 h cure before polishing |
| Visible seam in grazing light | Joint planned on a face | Move the joint to a corner or behind a return |
| Scuff on a painted figure | Sharp interior edge | Break interior edges 0.5 mm; no adhesive residue left inside |
| Case cracking in transit | Large case packed as one unit | Two-part case with a magnetic lid; corner foam and individual wrap |
Cases are small, so material is a small share of the price and labour is a large one. On a typical 300 mm display case: sheet 15–20 percent, cutting 10–15 percent, bonding and joint finishing 30–40 percent, base fabrication 10–15 percent, packing 10–15 percent. The joint is the product here, and the joint is skilled handwork.
The lever that matters most is size. A case up to about 400 mm can be built from one bonded assembly with the top edge polished in a single pass; past that, the polishing becomes a multi-stage operation and the failure risk rises. Where a collector wants a large case, we usually recommend splitting it into a base plus a lift-off cover, which is both cheaper and safer to ship.
Second lever: the base. A rebated base that locates the cover costs more than a flat plate, but it is the difference between a cover that slides and scuffs the model and one that sits still. Third: lighting. An LED plinth adds 15–25 percent to the unit price and is the single biggest perceived-value gain in this category, because it turns a case into a display.
What we quote as standard: flame-polished visible edges, solvent-bonded joints with a 24-hour cure, PE film on all faces until install, and individual foam wrap. None of these are options — they are what makes the piece sell.
| Item | What we need | Why it changes the price |
|---|---|---|
| Object dimensions | Height, width, depth, plus the margin you want around it | Sets the case size and whether it can be one bonded assembly |
| Base type | Flat plate, rebated base, or lit plinth | A lit plinth adds 15–25 % and is the biggest perceived-value gain |
| Lighting | Continuous or occasional, and the LED type | Decides whether UV-stabilised sheet is worth it |
| Lid type | Lift-off cover, magnetic, or hinged | Above 400 mm a two-part case ships and handles far better |
| Quantity and repeat | Units now, and whether a series continues | A continuing series justifies a stored master swatch and a jig |
Send a photo of the object next to a ruler. Proportion matters more than an exact millimetre here, and a photo tells us whether the case should grip the object or leave air around it.
Every joint inspected under raking light; printed parts compared within the batch.
Close to it, but not completely. Same-material solvent bonding on polished edges leaves a single fine line under raking light. Truly seamless means one-piece heat forming or casting, at roughly double the cost and lead time. In practice a joint held under 0.1 mm reads as a highlight line, which looks intentional.
One piece for a sample, and from 50 pieces the unit price settles. Bonding is a manual operation, so below 50 the setup — jigging, mixing, clamping — cannot be spread across the run.
Yes, both heat bending and CNC routing. The difficulty on a curved case is consistency at the four corners: angle tolerance within a batch has to hold at ±1°, or stacked units sit visibly askew. On routed shapes, internal corners below 2 mm radius will chip.
Yes, and it is why we keep the master swatch and the drawing. Send a photo of the existing case with a ruler against it and we will match sheet thickness, edge treatment and base construction. Colour is the one thing that cannot be matched across a gap of years, because sheet batches shift, so where a pair must match exactly we recommend making both at once.
Yes, but not as a single bonded cover. Above about 400 mm the polishing becomes a multi-stage operation and a one-piece cover is both expensive and fragile in transit. The normal construction is a rebated base plus a lift-off cover, shipped separately, with foam blocking inside the crate. That also makes the case practical to move once it is in place.
