Cleaning old miniatures: Let the water do the work

A new(?) technique for people who want to get rid of the paint on old figures: instead of laboriously cleaning the figure with a brush after bathing them in paint thinner for some days, simply remove the remaining paint in the shower with a very strong beam of water.

It's much faster and more accurate. You don't have to remove so much flakes manually afterwards. And because it's faster, it also avoids having to inhale too much of the smell or having to touch the figures while there's still some paint thinner on them. The miniatures are of course put into the shown bowl WITHOUT paint thinner!

The bowl prevents the figures from being thrown around and loose parts such as swords and shields are also caught. To get the best results I pick up every miniature and hold it under the stream to mill off the remaining paint flakes. 

The result. As always there is one who does not want to be cleaned. In every group, believe me. A clear case of pure resistentialism.

And for the environmentalists: I catch most of the paint flakes before they can go down the drain! There's a grate over the sink with small holes that catches most of them. And the used paint thinner is of course always collected and brought to the recycling center. Yes, that's used paint thinner above, not orange juice. I punched holes into the lids to let gas out when the miniatures take their bath. Don't know if I had to, only to be on the safe side.

An 8% jump

The vikings I wrote about a long time ago are finally ready. I bought a good part of them painted on a crisis convention years ago. For a while now I was on and off working on re-basing, repairing and partly repainting them. Yesterday evening I was ready and the guys went straight from the painting table to my (IKEA) miniature cabinet. I should have waited a little bit longer... the PVA glue on the bases was not dry enough and now I have to clean the glass. But I was so happy. And tired, it was very late.

So where is the jump? Well, I have an spreadsheet file that I use too manage my collection. The front page shows an overview of all projects with the amount of planned miniatures, how much missing, how much painted and so on, the project themselves are on separate sheets where they are split in armies and units.

A few days ago.

With the vikings now ready and the Brigant archers from last month the percentage of miniatures painted for this project jumped from 36% to 44%! Of course, the Vikings may not be ‚fantasy‘ miniatures but at the moment they belong to Retrosia and so are counted like that. Here they carry the name of the NORDMARK army and belong to the land of THULE.

(THULE is split in three kingdoms now: Runestone (Barbarians), Nordmark (Vikings, also called „the Sea People“ in this game) and Fimbul, the home of the northern Dwarves.)

Some leftovers still have to be done, one of them is missing his right hand and that means modeling a bit. I hope I can help him. As you can see commanders, champions and heroes get a slightly bigger base now to make them recognizable.

I think I will have to make the vikings a little bit more future proof. To make it possible to take them out of the fantasy context one day and use them for SAGA or other historical games I think I will have to add some archers or so.

So, enough for today. Happy Easter days to everybody!

Cleaning can bring unexpected revelations

These days I made a cleaning test. I took samples from some groups of the newcomers to find out if the paint is easy to strip. And there is a reason for that. Sometimes the old paint definitely does not dissolve and you end up having minis that stay half painted. Horrible to work with...

So I put these guys in paint thinner and forgot about them for more than a week. And I was right to test it beforehand. The male and female barbarians and the dwarf on the top left have kept most of their paint and therefore should not be treated with paint thinner. Now I know which groups I can clean easy and on what figures I have to work on top of the old paint.

Yes, I know, I said that I don't want to strip the paint this time, but working on some of the miniatures I found out that working on old paint that once was applied to thick is not so funny. A lot of the details are lost. I changed my mind on this.

Remember the miniatures I called 'Smurf Elves'? I did so because of the blue skin they have. But now one of them is free of paint and glue I was able to read what's written under the base: "Garrison" and "SS87". According to the StuffofLegends website this is a "Man-goblin with bow and spear" from their Sword & Sorcery range. "Sculpted by the late John Braithwaite and based on the Robert E. Howard Conan the Barbarian novels" (LostMinisWiki)

Fine, now let's find out what a "Man-Goblin" is and where they appear in the Conan stories... ;-)

The "Orc" has the mark "RAF" and "C." and "1985". I did not believe for a second that the Royal Air Force ever made orc miniatures so the next guess was RAFM miniatures. And I was right, I found them on the LostMinisWiki ( LINK ):

"RAFM originally released this Orcs series as "Legions of Darkness" and they were part of RAFM's "The World of Repauria" setting. This range of 25mm figures featured Orcs & Goblins and used product codes in the 3xxx range. All the models were sculpted by Bob Murch apart from the Chaos Goblins by Stephen Koo. In the UK, Portage Miniatures had the rights to manufacture this range. "