Routine and trivial one today - daughter's doll with a broken knee. The movable knee joint had been forced sideways breaking off part of the leg shell which forms a fork for the lower leg to pivot in. Just a matter of reassembling it and clamping after making sure there was no glue on any of the moving parts. For this I used Bostik's "Hard Plastic Glue" which seems to be a form of polystyrene cement. It works very well on rigid plastics and is very fast-setting. Superglue would probably be the second choice. It might still be necessary to fix a wire ring around the joint to support it, but I don't think it's likely.
Much harder to repair are the Barbie dolls. These are now soft-feel and parts are made of a flexible plastic like polythene (I think they use more specific names these days, but to me any waxy plastic is called either polythene or polypropylene). This stuff is a nightmare to glue together - none of the usual adhesives work very well. You might be able to weld it with a hot soldering iron, but that's messy and rarely strong enough. I've had a couple of Barbies who lost their heads (which are usually on a sort of knuckle joint at the neck, with the head pulled into the neck by a strong rubber band) and in one case I had to re-fix the head using a wire secured by drilling a hole in her lower back and blobbing the end with epoxy glue - I decided not to run it directly down to the obvious spot (!) for reasons of propriety. It wasn't pretty but the head was able to move around as before and the clothing covered the end of the repair wire. In the other case the head had to be rigidly glued back with impact adhesive.
It might seem pointless spending time and money fixing broken toys, and maybe by some standards it is. But giving a much-loved toy a new lease on life is a tiny contribution towards saving finite resources and usually means a lot more to its owner than you would think. That's good enough for me.
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