Wednesday, April 25, 2012

How to remove the filth...or paint from a miniature


Edit: Both those figs were stripped, the one on the right was then primed black with P3 black spray primer.
I have also painted straight on the figures without priming them, which also worked fine.  As you can see in the pic not all the primer came off with the soak in the power dissolver, which may work out well if that saves me a step.

I have had in my possession some poorly painted haradrim (not by me, although I have done plenty of poor paint jobs).  Since I started playing them again I wanted to strip them and paint them to match the rest of my army.  I have in the past used pine-sol and/or simple green.  I have never had real good luck with simple green so I had returned to using pine-sol, until a couple of weeks ago when I soaked some plastic BFG imperial cruisers and they got all soft and melty :(.  Sooooo I googled with a few terms ( can not remember which right now ) and up popped and interesting post on the Cool Mini or Not forums about this stuff called fairy power spray.  There was even a video of a chap over the pond using it to strip an eldar fire serpant or falcon or something.  Seemed to work pretty good so I googled some more ( twice in one day...does that mean I will go blind or grow fur on my palms or something?)  and found that in the states it is called Dawn Power Dissolver.  So I googled again ( so going to hell.....oh, wait...) and found that wal mart carries the stuff.  Since it is on the way to my FLGS I picked some up( @ $3:50 for 12 oz/350mls), which is in the dishwasher detergent section BTW.  I tried just spraying it on an letting it sit in a closed container overnight.  Which did take off some of the paint but not all of it, so I bit the bullet and dumped ( it is kind of a gel ) the whole thing into the container and threw in about a dozen plastic haradrim.  Well, I was a bit put-off by the way it looked the next day, the paint had clearly gotten soft and was staining an area in the gel around each figure.  Pulling them out of the gel and letting the excess  fall back into the container also showed evidence of soft paint.  There was still a great deal that was on the mini when I put it under running water to start scrubbing.  Well, much to my surprise a great portion of the paint simply washed right off the mini without any scrubbing!  Giving the mini a brief scrub removes 90%+ of the paint, I could even tell that these had been primed white since most of the primer came off as well.  The biggest problem, which is true for most stripping procedures, is the gooey mess the paint becomes.  It even softened the glue ( I think it was some cyanoacrylate ), so be careful.  There was still a light coating of white primer, enough to make the dark grey plastic a little less grey, but it was really a stain in the plastic than a coating at that point.  Overall I will definitely be moving to this for future stripping needs.  The gel in the container does become stained with the paint and gets darker each time, but after two dozen mini's stripped there does not seem to be any loss of performance. So if you have problems with simple green like me  try Dawn Power Dissolver.  Recommended by Jobu. They should give me some sponsorship.........

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