As a continuation from my brief tutorial on stripping metal models, comes… stripping plastic models. Now, I hope you didn’t throw away that undiluted batch of simple green from the first one. If you did, or you weren’t stripping anything previously, here is what you want to do.. er… this is what I did.. you can make your choices on your own.
Take about 70% simple green and 30% water (I just used tap) and mix that up a bit. Next you want to add your models. Try to make sure the parts you want stripped are submerged in the simple green mixture. (note – one could make all kinds of apparatuses to suspend only the parts of the models they wanted stripped in the mixture – ross is famous for having his land raider nose dive ) I didn’t care too much about the bottoms of these bikes so I made sure all the top parts were submerged.
I waited about 4 hours before stripping, which I feel was enough time to start to break up the paint. Unlike the metal models, these are a bit tougher to strip. They require more elbow grease, and if you weren’t the original owner, who knows what you might find under those layers. The diluted simple green doesn’t seem to dissolve the super glue as well as the undiluted, so you need to be careful not to break pieces off or scrub too hard and bend the ones you don’t want bent. I ended up breaking off a few handle bars before I decided to be a bit more careful.
The trick for me was to get a nice lather going. Since only manly men play 40k, you all will obviously appreciate the similarities of using a loofa in the shower with some herbal essences shower gel. It comes out in a lotion medium, but you need to work the loofa in order to get the cleansing suds you need for your dirty body. Right! The NO gay porn guarantee… so as I was saying the lather is the key here. The paint just seemed to come off easier once that simple green was worked around a bit. I kept having to go back into the container to fill my brush to get more suds. But in the end, the more suds I had on the model, the cleaner it came out.
Rinse thoroughly, and blot dry with a paper towel. (sorry for bad image) As you can see here in the pictures, the previous owner has some kind of black primer on these that just did not want to come off. The job isn’t perfect, but once I reprime them, you’ll never know they have been reworked.
As an end note.. don’t forget to clean up the sink before your wife gets home from work!
-Brother C
I just stripped a bunch of plastic minis with some brake fluid. People complain about it but it always gets the job done for me. Next to all the paint that was obscuring the detail is gone now after a little toothbrush work.
ReplyDeleteI find that either Dettol Disinfectant(the brown liquid) or Fairy Power Spray work very well.
ReplyDeleteI prefer the Power Spray as the Dettol can go gummy if you get water on them so you have to scrub with undiluted but Dettol is cheaper. Very effective though.
The Power Spray only needs a few hours of soak and can generally strip the whole model in its first application. A second if needed guarantees it.