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It started off as stripping a few old metal miniatures that I picked up on craigslist to save a few bucks. Before I knew it I was stripping/disassembling/reassembling entire plastic vehicles and units, replacing parts, and actually enjoying the process.

This has been one of the more interesting developments in my wargaming hobby. At first it was just about saving a few bucks, but now it's a point of pride that I can take a Leman Russ that looks like a 3rd grader's glue experiement or a squad of guardsmen with more paint than plastic and turn them into fine (tabletop-quality, I'm not an amazing painter) gaming pieces. I figure it must be akin to the feeling that a furniture restorer gets when a garage sale dresser covered in textured paint is restored to a natural finish beauty in someone's bedroom.

Anybody else come to enjoy rehablitating wargames miniatures?

Well, Ive stoped using plastic glue, because its to hard to break apart. I think that qualify

I have rehabed 5 full armies (WFB Chaos Mortals, Empire, IG, Necron and Tau) and parts of another so far (Orks). So far they have proved to be much more rewarding than just cutting and gluing right off the sprue. But, once I was finished with them I have given or sold them to people that couldn't afford to get into the hobby. My cousin which his mom is and will not buy anything for him got the Chaos, and Necron armies. A poor kid whose dad and mom both were laid off and evicted from their home got the Empire army. The IG and Tau armies went to people for a trades or low price to people that lived a long ways away from a FLGS.

The only one so far that I have kept for myself is the orks. Right now I am slow working on building up a necron force so I will be ready when the new codex comes out. People are dumping Necrons cheep and they are super easy to rehab.

I managed to make a 1000 point vanilla marine force from bits and my little brothers mutilated force

I have been enjoying stripping some of the classic metal ork minis that I got on ebay. I also generally like rehabbing things, but I get more time to rehab less hobby related things, like my apartment. What I mean is people around interrupt less if I'm working on something they can see from down the hall. :~/

I spend some time on it when I can. I'm one of those people who will look at my own pieces and say "I can do a better job" and end up stripping and repainting all 8 of my Imperial Guard tanks, then I see my old Bilbo model in the rest of my LOTR stuff, then I see more stuff...its a never-ending cycle... I also made my 2nd Tervigon (Red and Blue one in my gallery) using a carnifex some idiot put together using plastic glue....
Granesh

i just stripped my old space wolf blood claws and combined them with the new sw sprue.

they were the first metal minis i painted and now they look so much better.

mainly because my painting improved a bit in the last 14 years

couple of weeks i bought 6 eldar banshees for 10 bucks.they were awfully painted(gold with heavy green wash) and most details were gone.
stripped,based and done ^^

and i got hold of an old metal land speeder.waits to be painted

My Crimson Fists army is almost all secondhand stuff, and considering about half the army is models made in the 80s, I had to do a lot of stripping and scrubbing to get them cleaned up and ready to paint. Sometimes it's just too much effort though.

I love cobbling together full models from random bits. Nothing gives me greater pleasure.

However, once a paint scheme has gone awry, I'm done. I live in an area of high humidity, so my primer paint can wind up with a dusty, pebbly texture that ruins the model. When this happens, or a paint scheme goes terribly wrong (to the point that it needs to be stripped, rather than painted over) I just put the model in a box. I have twenty or thirty of them, I think. I can't bring myself to strip another damn model, only to face the possibility of another ruined coat of primer.

I have transformed three unused land raiders into Battlewagons, just in case I don't want to use my other ones, which have deffrollas and zzap guns to save some points. I've also transformed three rhino's into looted wagons with boomguns. That second project was a waste of time, because looted wagons with boomguns are about as worthless as flash gitz and lootas.

I came across a whole box of Rogue Trader marines a couple summer's back after asking on a local forum.

They were covered in layers of testor's paint, but a few days in a bucket of Castrol Superclean had them clean down to their bone coloured plastic.

Now they are taking pride of place on a shelf in the basecoat colours of my Luna Wolves army.

I love rehabbing models, and I have done land speeders, countless infantry and most recently a land raider.

Pipboy101 wrote:I have rehabed 5 full armies (WFB Chaos Mortals, Empire, IG, Necron and Tau) and parts of another so far (Orks). So far they have proved to be much more rewarding than just cutting and gluing right off the sprue. But, once I was finished with them I have given or sold them to people that couldn't afford to get into the hobby.

Wow, you must be a painting machine. I can barely find time to paint units for my BA and IG forces. Kudos on spreading the hobby.

Granesh wrote:I spend some time on it when I can. I'm one of those people who will look at my own pieces and say "I can do a better job" and end up stripping and repainting

I hadn't thought of stripping my own paint jobs. I have alot of BA painted years ago that need a dip and some flock, but that's the limit off my redo's of stuff I've done myself.

Jimsolo wrote: I can't bring myself to strip another damn model, only to face the possibility of another ruined coat of primer.

Sounds like a brush on primer may be needed. Have you tried Gesso. I've had good luck with it this year, both as a regular primer, and for primering over prepainted figs.

Joyous_Oblivion wrote:
They were covered in layers of testor's paint, but a few days in a bucket of Castrol Superclean had them clean down to their bone coloured plastic.

How do you find the Superclean in comparision to Simple green? I bought the new purple Simple green (same color as the Superclean) and it seems to be working well, but I haven't tried Superclean yet.