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Friday 27 April 2007

Tom's Experimental Lab

Plastic models, although great for converting and assembling, have always been a problem for newbie painters. Why? Because unlike their metal counterparts, they tend to melt when dipped into that acid-etching stuff used to remove the paint from metal or wooden furniture.
Plastics have always been some sort of a one-way tickets. If you screwed up the paintjob, then you scewed up the mini, and that meant 5€ you'd never see again.

There is no way to get the paint off without turning the poor warrior into a horrid, amorphic blob of plastic. So unless you are planning to buy a new possessed/mutant for your warband... NOT a good solution.

I recently heard rumours that ordinary "brake fluid" from cars should get the paint off plastic models without damaging them. In the interest of science, of all exasperated noobs and of satisfing my own curiosity, I decided to test this rumour.

I bought "Synthetic Brake Fluid" from the local petrol station and found myself a victim.



I poured the fluid over the mini hoping for some fizzling effects. Nothing happend.



Let's wait a while. I observed that the fluid grew darker ("Dark Angels darker" if you get the meaning). That means that at least some of the paint is beeing solvatised by the fluid. Great!



After 5 hours (and a little rubbing around on the miniature with an old brush) i took the miniature out.

It haden't changed much except for the colour which had gotten lighter on some parts. So I washed it and rubbed a little with my finger. Some of the paint went off. The plastic underneath looked as if new.



Unfortunately the fluid did not yield the results I had hoped for. After 30 mins the paint went off easily on approx. 40% of the miniature. Waiting longer did only slightly improve that (5 hours). I had to scrape the rest with a needle. Although it then also came off rather easily, it is tedious work to manually "clean" every detail of the figure (I did NOT completely clean the miniature for the picture!)

My conlcusion:

This method is NOT suited for cleaning large amounts of miniatures.

Although I think it might be comforting to know for some people, that their botched plastic warband captain is not forever lost. You CAN save him, if you invest a little time in the cleaning.
Still, I believe I must run more tests to see if this also applies to my beloved Vallejo colours.
The test-miniature I used also had many layers of old paint. Maybe that makes a difference...

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

hahah that's the formulla you told about, it's seems to work:D..

Anonymous said...

what a geek!

Anonymous said...

that's verry niceXD:S

Anonymous said...

and again: GEEK!

Thomas said...

Please do not insult or poke fun at other people/visitors on my blog.

This blog is in no way meant to be serious. We're just having fun and don't need you to judge it. If you can't handle all the "geekiness" then please just leave.

Thank you.


The Admin

NB: Further insulting comments will by removed.

Anonymous said...

Je confirme le fait , sur une figurine dont la peinture est ancienne , il est très difficile d'éliminer celle-ci sauf avec cette méthode et un trempage excessif (le liquide de frein de moto marche aussi )!!!

See ya !!!

Thomas said...

Aaaah tu connaissais cette methode? :-) C'était complètement nouveau pour moi. En tout cas j'ai fait un deuxième essai de "trempage excessif" comme tu dis et là ca marche mieux. Ca fait plus de 24h que la figurine est dedans mais je vais la laisser encore quelques jours...

Nicholas said...

Moi chuis d'accord avec Mister Anonymous : what a geek !

:D

Thomas said...

Gusch Hernanz! :)

Mach lieber einen Post zu dem Brett dass du "gravé" hast. Sinon c'est moi qui le fais...

Signé:
Un admin anonyme

Nicholas said...

Sehr geehrter Herr Admin,

Da ich leider aufgefordert wurde, die Photos des neu-gravierten Bretts mit Photoshop zu ändern, damit man den Bordel dans Ta Chambre nicht erkennt, wird dies eine zu lange Zeit dauern und leider muss ich höflichst absagen.
NIERK NIERK :)
Et puis autant faire un post à la fin, quand ce sera peint et sous-couché etc.
J'ai hâte de voir comment tu vas peindre ma petite dalle à la gloire de Sigmar ! :) N'oublie pas: faut que ce soit bien érodé !!

La Tortue Masquée et Anonyme

PS "and again: GEEK" huhu

Thomas said...

Ok Nicou, en fait t'as raison, on fera un post tout à la fin avec quelques photos du "Werdeprozess".

T'inquiète, je vais éroder la planche.

à +

Tom

Anonymous said...

Nail Varnish remover does the job perfectly on plastic figures. I use an old toothbrush to remove any flaky bits left over. Once it's dry It's ok to repaint.