May 14
Stripping Paint off of Metal Miniatures
When the game of Mordheim first came out, my friends and I really wanted to play the game, and really didn’t want to paint the miniatures. So as you can imagine, I have a nice collection of horribly painted miniatures. Probably the worst part about my old miniatures’ paint jobs is how thick the paint was ladled on. The paint was so thick in some places you couldn’t see the details of the miniature/model.
So I decided to strip the paint off of these miniatures. I’m going to start with my metal minis:
In this picture you can see 6 squigs, one metal Orc arm/sword, hand and “standard”(banner?). None of these models had any shading, just color-in-the-lines type of painting. The squigs were painted two colors: Red and white. Just enough to get them in the game.
So begins the removal of the paint:
I got a tip from Admin Tom (or maybe DeafNala… I can’t find the thread=( ) to use Nail Polish Remover to strip the paint, so here is me trying nail polish remover.
I borrowed a bottle of purple (awful-smelling) liquid, my wife said was nail polish remover (right), and filled a small bowl with it. I dropped in a squig, and let it sit for an hour or two. I then gave it a good scrubbing with a toothbrush, and finally took a razor blade, and scrapped out the rest of the paint still stuck in the crevices. Be careful with the razor blade as it can cut up the model/miniature. Tom from Tom’s Boring Mordheim Blog mentioned that he used a pin to clean out some of the crevices (when he removed paint from a plastic miniature).
Here’s a picture of just this one squig as it progressed through the day (click to enlarge):
You can see in this picture just how much paint was in the crevices between the teeth. I wasn’t able to remove it all, but I tried. It was quite a process, and it took just about all day (5 minutes at a time) to remove the paint from all of the metal miniatures I had at hand.
Summary, this process works well… but I really hope there is a better way, because this took a lot of elbow grease to remove all the paint.
Side Note: Not recommended for people with sensitive noses: at the end of the day, I had a screaming headache from the smell.
-Ashton Sanders