Yeah, sounds fun when I shorten it like that for the title, doesn’t it? I spent yesterday evening researching and experimenting with stripping paint from plastic Warhammer 40,000 models. If you’re unfamiliar with Warhammer 40k, a brief explaination: I don’t play. No, really though, it’s a game that Alex plays. It’s created by a company called Games Workshop and is billed as “The Tabletop Battlegame of The Far Future.” Basically, it’s a table top game played with dice, models, and templates in which you wage war against an opponent (or opponents, it depends on which starting scenario you choose to use). The models are 28 mm (1.1 in) scale, so pretty small and in large quanities. For those who do know the game and care, Alex plays Space Marines (Black Templars) and Dark Eldar. Wikipedia gives a more full explaination if you’re curious.
Ahem.
All that to get to this point: many of his models are, well, old. This game’s been out for a while (1988) and he’s been playing since early to mid-1990s. And, as with anything else, the more you do it, the better you get at it. A huge part of Warhammer 40k is painting your models. And his older ones need some help. Inconsistancies range from simply spraying too thick a coat of black base spraypaint and marring the details that would make the model look much better to a bad paint choice to not knowing what he was doing and layering way too many layers on top of each other.
So he wants to strip them of the original acrylic paint back down to the plastic (and in some cases, metal) model and redo them.
I spent a good hour or two last night searching through gamer forums to find the answers. The most popular, it seems, is brake fluid. I’m hesitant to use it indoors and that’s all I’ve got, and I was also hoping for something a bit less toxic. I ran across a few mentions of using Windex. So I thought, hey, I’ll give it a shot.
Alex had pulled 2 marines for me to test with before he went to work. They both had similar paint jobs and looked very nearly the same. Here’s one before any experimentation:
I filled up a mason jar partway with the Windex and let the model soak. After about an hour’s dunking, I pulled the marine out and used an old toothbrush to scrub at him. Results below:
That lighter grey you can see on the backs of his hands, under his arms, and on his guns, is the original base plastic colour. Or closer to it anyway. You can see I managed to chip off some of the white on his shoulder using my fingernail.
Overall, if the paint had been fresher, it might’ve worked ok. But clearly didn’t work well. In scrubbing, I broke off the marine’s backpack. Whoops.
The second most popular option I saw was a clearner called Mean Green. I was too lazy to find where to buy it here though. So I found a third popular option: Pine-Sol. Yes, the floor cleaner. I saw ratios from a 50%/50% solution of water & Pine-Sol to using 100% Pine-Sol. I decided to buy a bottle and give it a go. Hey, if it didn’t work, I could use it to clean with, right?
I used the same (rinsed out) mason jar and filled it with 8 oz Pine-Sol and 8oz water. I used the same previously Windexed marine because if Pine-Sol was going to melt him, I’d prefer to just ruin one and have another I could test more on.
8:15 or thereabouts, when I started the Pine-Sol experiment:
Around 8:30, after 15 minutes of soaking:
You can see a little of the paint has come off, but not much.
About this time, I pulled him out of the Pine-Sol and gave him a scrub with the toothbrush. AND WHOA:
Look at how much came off! That grey all along his arm, the chips under the black on his right shoulder, that’s all the original plastic.
I put him back in for another dip, to see how much more I could get off.
9:00 and no brushing
9:30 and time for another brushing.
He turned out like this after the second good Pine-Sol scrub:
10:30, with another scrub between. The stripping one is in the jar, the (blurry) original is in front. You can really see now how much I stripped off.
11:00 and I decided to call it a night with the first model. I think Alex dumped him back in, along with his pack, to see how much more he could get off his legs and stuff.
We started the second one. The process was pretty much the same: short Pine-Sol soak, toothbrush scrub, back to soak more.
11:30ish: 
Midnight: 
And then I lost interest and let Alex take over. I did, however, wake up this morning to a metal one we started testing just before I went to sleep, still soaking, a plastic one soaking (to test if soaking or soaking & brushing was what really worked), and 2 clean models.
Colour me impressed. I’ll never look at Pine-Sol quite the same again.
Tip to anyone who decides to test it though? Use gloves. I didn’t the first few and my hands were not happy with me.
