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...