For the longest time, “Amber-eyed” Samantha was like my holy grail of collecting. I had spent countless years searching for her, but always came up empty. I lost every auction or just missed one for a steal. This time I had an opportunity to adopt an Amber Sam semi-locally and jumped at the chance. From the photos she looked in pretty good shape. But soon I learned her bangs weren’t just keeping her eyes from opening, they were simply stuck. I wasn’t going to let this stop me from owning my first 1986 Samantha doll, so I took her home. I’m pretty good at fixing dolls and maybe this wouldn’t be such a big deal after all.

Wow, I couldn’t be more wrong. I soon found out this wasn’t a minor problem after all. After removing the eyes and looking around the casing, I discovered that the weight had a bunch of white chalky stuff gunking the lever and was keeping it from moving. A little compressed air might have solved the problem if it was simply dirty in there, but it wasn’t dirt clogging the sleeping mechanism, the metal weight had actually corroded and started to disintegrate. There was no getting around it, I was going to have to break off the metal part of the casing to get a better look and possibly replace the weight.

With a pair of needle nose pliers I took hold of the metal bracket piece of the casing and gently twisted to loosen the seal. Then I pulled off the case and looked for the condition of the metal. It was worse than I thought. Not only had the metal disintegrated, but it had fallen off and taken some of the plastic lever with it, leaving no place to put a new metal weight.

My only idea at this point was to fashion the metal weight like some of the other white bodied doll eyes. For whatever reason, the early Samantha dolls have a different weight system in their eyes. I was going to have to create a new way for her to blink.

After chipping away what was left of the broken plastic lever with the needle nose pliers, I filed away the remaining edge with a metal file my husband had in his tool box. This made the back of the eye smooth, where I could super glue a weight I removed from a silvered white body Kirsten doll eye. I used the same Kirsten doll eye casing (2 pieces-a plastic cradle and a metal bracket) to set the Samantha doll eye in.

After doing some testing and discovering that the eyes work (yay!), I put the eyes back into Samantha. Now I can enjoy her with open eyes!