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Hi,

I just purchased a gallon of Simple Green, and am planning to use it to remove paint on three things:

1) Several metal High Elf archers
2) Several plastic Tau gun drones
3) A plastic Tau hammerhead tank

I have looked through the old posts regarding simple green and a few of the tutorials, but I still have questions! I am most concerned about the Hammerhead. I was planning on fully submerging all of these models when I get home tonight at 9:00pm, and taking them out to scrub around 2:00pm tomorrow. This is about all the time I have, will it be enough? Or will it be too much for the plastics, and should I take them out early?

I'm planning to go at all of them with a cheap electric toothbrush tomorrow. Thanks for any tips that would prevent me from ruining my models

I just pulled a Leman Russ and a Chimera that had been sitting in a Simple Green bath for 3 days. There was no damage, melting, etc anywhere on the model. There was however still a nice coat of enamel spray used to prime the model that was left behind. I personally find that I get better results when I hook up an aquarium aerator (the waterfall kind). When it just sits soaking, it seems to be a lot slower. I also find that Simple Green eats through acrylic paint easily enough, but encounters serious difficulties with Enamel on plastic (while practically dissolving it on pewter).

With all the Tau repaints I have done for my brother in the last couple of weeks, we have used simple green A BUNCH.

Simple Green has worked great. He lets the stuff soak over night and then gives it a good cleaning with a tooth brush and if it does not get everything off he soaks it again over night and hits it again.

No bad side effects at all....at this point.

A product called "Super clean" works a lot better on plastics than Simple Green. It used to be made by Castrol, but I think they sold the rights to it. You can find in automotive stores, it comes in a purple bottle. I believe that it is also bio-degradable if you're worried about such things. If you can't find it or are adamant about using Simple Green the issue you might run into is the fact that it's not very good at removing paints off plastics in one go. If the models were primed with spray paint it's even worse. However, there's no risk to the plastic itself from Simple Green. You can leave the models in there leave it in there for days or even weeks really. Also, I don't think you really need an electric brush, the paint typically comes off quite easily and a normal brush might be better for reaching into crevices.

I always dilute my simple green for the fear of damaging the plasic models. 60% Simple Green and 40% Water. It may work faster if you don't dilute it as much but I left my figures in there for a couple of days.

Thanks guys I'm going to drop them in now and let you know how it goes tomorrow!

Hi,

Just wanted to post the results. Unfortunately I didn't have time to take pics, had to ship these off to someone to be painted!

The metal models did wonders, and the plastic did pretty well- better than I expected. However, if I had to do it all over again, I'd probably use Simple Green again for the metal, and find something else for the plastic! It was hard to get the paint out of the nooks and crannies of the plastic since it didn't get as loose.

Thanks for the tips guys

Now, I fully expect this to be a silly idea, but it sounds to me that a solution to paint stuck in the deep cracks is a food blender. Just 'convert' it to have paddles instead of knives, a layer or two of chickenwire on top of that (to put the models on), and then fiddle with it to make it go real slow. Might be a bit small though. And since right now is the first time I've heard of simple green, it might be way off.