Saturday, March 22, 2014

The emperor's new cloths - Striping the paint from metal miniatures

Hi all,

last week, I decided that the number of painted metal miniatures in my stash reached a critical mass. So it was time to give them a bath and clean them from their old clothes of color. I find it always a little sad to do this and erase the previous owner's interpretation and attempts on these beautiful sculpts. But hey, they sold them! And only this way I can make express my own creative ideas...

So enough bla bla! Here we go! The best cleaning solution appears to be aceton ( you get one liter for a few Euro in your favorite home center or tool store).  I also bought one of these cheap two-sided scrubbers with tough hairs. Coincidentally,  I had a big empty jar (from pickles), so I through in as many miniatures as possible and filled the jar up with aceton. Some paint came of immediately and colored the fluid but I left the miniatures inside for a couple of days just to make sure. :-)

WARNING: Don't throw any plastic (or resin?) parts into the aceton. They will get completely resolved!

After a few days, it was cleaning time:



Many miniatures are happy to get rid of their paint when one takes them out of the aceton...

... so it just takes some scrubbing and brushing and they look like virgins! ;-)

There were a few, which were a bit more reluctant like these troopers below. So they had to go back into the jar for a few additional days after scrubbing as good as possible...

This commissar looked pretty cool as if some Nurgle sorcerer put an evil spell on him making his skin peel off.... ;-)

Oh! Another WARNING: Protect your cutting mat from the aceton! It leaves nasty stains.

Because of this and pieces of paint flying away during the brushing work I moved everything into a not to deep paper box...
 
I tried cleaning with the electric tooth brush too, but I found it not very efficient, mainly because the hairs are to soft. On the other hand, using some wooden pick to remove paint in the corner or difficult to reach places proved more helpful.

All in all, it was a pretty successful action that now left me with 90% clean miniatures waiting for their new "clothes" now! ;-)

Happy scrubbing everybody! 

No comments:

Post a Comment