Removing Permanent Bases

[Lynx]

Recently I've been wondering... am I able to remove permanent bases with a knife? I've done this before with BOTMs habitat pack nests (in order to get a lone egg) and it worked quite well. I've been making some support rods recently with the question of "Can I remove CollectA figures from their bases?"
If so, I was planning to hold them up using those rods. I strongly dislike bases because of how much space they take up and how they sort of ruin the figure for me. Is this a good idea to remove them? Have any of y'all done it before?

[Fenestra]

I have removed the base from the CollectA Carnotaurus and Bistahieversor with succes.
I carefully cut underneath the plastic of the feet with a super sharp blade to get it seperated from the base. Now and then I would try to get a screw driver under the feet to wiggle around a bit and carefully lift the feet of the base. Then back to the knife again. It's really hard to do.
It took a long time. And a lot of blood, sweat and tears. And a lot of cursing too.
But it can be done.
Just take your time and don't force it.

[stargatedalek]

Treating them with hot water first makes the plastic easier to cut safely.

As for using support rods, some figures are able to balance just by leaning on one if the base is shaped just right, but otherwise you can always cut up extra length of rod and glue it across like a cross beam, picture a free standing bird perch.

[Lynx]

Is there any cheap knockoff figure with a permanent base I can practice on?

[stargatedalek]

Is there any cheap knockoff figure with a permanent base I can practice on?

After shipping buying KO's of something like CollectA is almost as expensive as the real deal, not really a point.

What you can try however, is birds. Local dollar stores likely have sets of farm animals which usually contain at least a chicken if not a duck too, almost always these would be made fused to permanent bases.