| Posted: 15 February 2008 at 12:15pm | IP Logged | 8
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Re: Paint removal
Per some recommendations I've read on some lead military miniatures sites, I tried using Pine-Sol to remove the paint from my donor for the Iron Man convesion I'm working on. I soaked the figure in a roughly 70/30 Pine-Sol and water mix for about a week (put it in a shallow aluminum pot pie pan, placed the pan in a bucket with a lid, then let it sit in my garage) -- when I took the figure out of the Pine-Sol bath, the paint seemed slick and greasy but it still felt intact, for the most part, like the Pine-Sol didn't even touch it.
I took a toothbrush to it, though, and the paint started to abrade a bit; with a bit more brushing, the paint began to slide off in large chunks. After a bit more scrubbing, almost all of the paint just slid off, more or less -- there's still some paint in some of the crevices, but I think acetone would fix that.
The base was a different story, though -- I had the figure laying down, so part of the base wasn't immersed, and as a result, I was left with a bare metal figure and a base in bad need of full paint removal (the paint seemed to adhere to the plastic base more tenaciously than it did to the lead). Some of the paint did come off the base, and the plastic underneath was unscathed by the Pine-Sol, which is good. I have repeated the Pine-Sol bath procedure -- this time making sure to immerse all of the base -- and I left the figure in the garage again for the past week or so. I'll probably take it out over the weekend and try to get the paint off the base, then I'll borrow some of my wife's acetone nail polish remover to get the paint out of the crevices on the metal parts of the figure.
THEN the trimming and sculpting begins -- I'll be using two-part Kneadatite apoxy ("green stuff") to form the armor details . . . as I said earlier in the thread, my plan is to create a classic red-and-gold version of Iron Man (the "Iron Robot" figure they produced just doesn't cut it for me).
Anyway, to make a long story short, Pine-Sol does seem to work for paint removal, and it doesn't seem to damage the plastic base, but it's not very aggressive and it takes time and patience (and a toothbrush and some scrubbing). If you're impatient, paint thinner or acetone might be quicker, but I caution anybody who tries to strip the paint on these figures to be careful of the base -- it IS plastic, NOT lead, so some chemicals might be fine for removing the paint from the lead figure but they might do damage to the base.
Hope this helps!
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