Monday, May 30, 2016

Getting things super clean

So why am I showing you a pair of my Sisters of Sigmar? Because 20 hours ago, they had primer, paint and a couple layers of varnish on them. I've been reading that the cleaner/degreaser "Super Clean" was almost a miraculous godsend of a paint stripper, so I decided to try some.

I soaked all of my Sisters of Sigmar in a small plastic tub for about 20 hours (overnight and until I got back home from work.) I agitated the tub two or three times for just a few seconds each. When I opened the tub this evening, I saw a lot of bare metal before I even got the toothbrush on them.

The toothbrush simply pulled the remaining paint from the figures -- there was no hard scrubbing required. Even paint in crevices was coming out easily. Yep -- miraculous was right!
I also threw in a plastic horse overnight, and it seems to have survived just fine, but I'll read some more to see what, if any, long term effects there are on plastic.

I'm pretty stoked; it's like I've just bought a whole bunch of new minis for the price of the some cleaner (around $8 for a gallon.) I used to use Simple Green; Soak the mini for a week, scrub, soak for a few days, scrub, soak for a couple days, scrub a last time. With Super Clean, the paint comes off just by looking at it the next morning.

This is bad: I might just end up chucking most of the old mountain into a bunch of giant tubs of this stuff. It's just going to make the painting queue that much longer.

A couple notes on using Super Clean:
-- You WILL need rubber gloves unless you enjoy chemical burns. Read all the warnings.
-- It will dissolve most superglue bonds, so keep track of small parts that may fall off during soaking.
-- Was previously called "Castrol Super Clean," but the "Super Clean" you can find at Walmart is the same stuff.

2 comments:

  1. I once left a dozen or so plastic Dark Eldar in a tub of Super Clean for a couple of months or so. There was no problem with them at all.

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