A while back, I shared some tips on how to use acrylic risers to improve figure displays and I wanted to do a continuation of that post. I have a few 1:4 and 1:6 scale statues in my collection that I love, but each of them independently is too tall to fit into a shelf in my Ikea Detolf cases. The quickest solution is to just remove one of the glass shelves, but in the instance of my Volks Belldandy & Holy Bell statue, she only needs a couple of more inches in order to fit so it creates a large area of dead space over her.

If you’re living in a relatively small space, like I do, every inch of display area is precious so it really bothered me to have almost an entire shelf rendered unusable. This is when an idea came to Kevin: since we couldn’t stand the figures on a shelf, why not suspend them from the top? In theory it seemed like a great idea, but we needed to use something very strong but not too thick because we wanted to create the illusion of the figures floating. Strength was important because if anything fell, it could end up damaging a very expensive statue underneath it. He was inspired by some of the jewellery I used to make, and decided to experiment using nylon-coated steel beading wire and crimping beads. The steel wire has a tensile strength of upwards of 50 lbs and wouldn’t cause any damage to the figures being suspended from them. After a few years, we switched out the steel beading wire and used fishing line instead (which has an incredible tensile strength, varying depending on what kind you buy!) because it’s more transparent and looked much cleaner.

Here are a few of my shelves that use this suspended figure method –

Here’s the Sierra airship from Final Fantasy 7 hovering over an epic battle between Cloud and Sephiroth.

Here are Belldandy, Skuld, Urd, Peorth and Hild flying over my Belldandy & Holy Bell statue. Notice the edge where the glass shelf would have originally been placed, and how much space in the case would have been unusable.

There’s a couple of lines of fishing line across the top of the shelf, and the figures are suspended from them by their arms and hair.

This is the bottom half of my KOS-MOS case –

This is what the the attachment to the side of the shelf looks like and where the crimp beads are located.

The basic tools you’ll need are crimping beads, fishing line or nylon-coated steel beading wire and crimping pliers. The advantage of using crimping pliers over regular pliers is that instead of just flattening the crimp bead it bends it into a “U” to create a more secure hold.

I hope that this helps you think outside the box, and to help you guys use some otherwise “dead space.” ^__^”