Not exactly painting but How to you repar broken bayonets

Thank

I have never been able to do it that will last.  You can try CA glue but it never seems to last long.  For bigger things like flagstaffs I have been able to drill out a spot and use a pin of the right diameter to replace the top part.  Usually with a broken bayonet I trim it off and make it look like it wasnt there in the first place.  If it gets bad enough I make the whole unit match with out baynotes.  

I seem to recall a user who made bayonets out of slivers of card stock which he then attached with CA glue to the ends of the muzzles.  He used them to customize his ACW figures that were not cast with bayonets.  Painted silver, they looked pretty good and might hold up better than metal joined to metal. 

I recently had occasion to scratchbuild some bayonets on to WW2 infantry. The solution I found was to make them with extremely thin plasticard and attach with CA glue.

It seems to work. If you touch them by accident they bend (rather than snap off) then spring back into position afterwards.

And yes, I realise how sad it is to scratchbuild 6mm bayonets.

Probably not the answer you are looking for... but don't bother!

In the Napoleonice period the quality of arms was very variable. I had a Brown Bess musket and boyonet in my hands about 2 years ago and the end of the boyonet was bent over from where it had hit a bone and deformed. Some bayonets were of phenomenally low quality, and according to some journals and war diaries I have read, broken bayonets were not that uncommon. A few figures without bayonets would be fine.

Also, and I say this as a serving officer, if a 'squadie' can lose something, he almost certanly will! (Says the man who lost a £3,000 night sight vision scope on the training area at Sandhurst 17 years ago!)

I convert some without bayonets into halberds and company alignment flags (think they are called penons) with dressmaking pins and alfoil. Fiddly work but strangely therapeutic and adds some more colour, which helps as I am doing 1:10 so have 72 figure battalions.  I also use pins for standard and fanions, eagle sits perfectly on the pin head and allows me to have a bigger flag. Not for the purists but works for me.