Paint Stripping Guide: Strip your army for under $5!! *updated 5/23/13 NEW STUFF

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**Adrian Fue Fue**

Nice well done. I used to do the Simple Green, but I went techie and got an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner instead. It cost me like $60 and does the trick in like a champ. Don't really need the toothbrush. But $60 vs $3 yeah, maybe just a nice bath soak is all they really needed.

**hotsauceman1**

Just incase anyone was still wondering, it works for finecast too

**KingCracker**

mars2024 wrote:LATA worked well enough for me on some pieces I wanted to start over with, but after 2 days in the bath the white primer is still strong (and unfortunately still very craqueled) and all the glue has released.

I didn't realize I'd be rebuilding as well as repainting.

Then you should of read the thread a bit more carefully, its been mentioned that it loosens glue bonds. Just sayin.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

hotsauceman1 wrote:Just incase anyone was still wondering, it works for finecast too

Well thats a + to add to the front page me thinks. Thanks for the tip

**Gunnvulcan**

KingCracker wrote:* And once more, after a long soak, its been known to loosen some glue bonds.
**Apparently its safe to use this on finecast as well. I havnt personally tested it on finecast to be able to say for sure, but its been told that it works like a champ

Its true, I wouldnt lie. Ive tried a bunch of different things to strip a mini over the years. Simple green, purple power, SuperClean, paint stripper (That poor Ork boy)
Some work well, some decent, some horrible. Usually you have to leave the minis in your chemical for 3 days to a week to get good results, and that to me just didnt seem to be good enough. Ive been told about a product that works wonders and is cheap to boot, so I finally got around to testing it and was pretty damn impressed with its outcome. Heres my tutorial on how to use the stuff, if your a seasoned pro, then you can just glaze over and just try the stuff, but this is mainly for those of you that have little to no experience on taking the menace that is bad paintjobs off a mini with good results. So enjoy.

The magical product is called LA's Totally Awesome! I paid a whopping $3 for the larger jug in the picture from a dollar store. This is great since America has one about every 5 miles. Im not sure if this is sold over seas, so sorry to you guys over the pond if you cant get your hands on it.

Ok what you need firstly is a plastic container to hold the chemical in(dont water it down, go full strength) .Then a nice toothbrush, I used a soft bristle but having a hard bristle around might be a good idea as well for that hard to scrub off paint. Make sure with the toothbrush your not scrubbing hard, if you have to put much effort into this then either the paint is not ready or the stripping agent is not working how it should. Make sure you pour enough LATA(La's totally awesome) in to submerge the minis you put there, I doubt itll work that well half in half out You should end up with something like this

I let the minis soak for about 12 hours and tested out the stripping. Id say this will work well if you have light paint or something on there. Now these crons were nasty so I decided to let them sit a whole day. Here is everything I put in the tub o doom.
Now the warriors are half primed in GW white and the other half was a cheap black primer (I know this because I knew the guy I got them from) Then for good measure of the stripping abilities I added metal flayed ones and to REALLY test it out, a terminator sgt that was not only painted by a new painter, BUT sealed in MINWAX! Oh yea, more on that later.

So a full-ish day of soaking you get this (note they are not pink, so please dont ask why they are pink. Im not Dash here )
Its getting nasty in there but thats a good thing, its paint and such. Now you want to take your brush out and start scrubbing. Youll want to get into EVERY recess you can get into here. Also like I said before, DO NOT scrub hard, youll just break things and wear yourself out, if its working right the paint pretty much just rubs off. Use the tips of your bristles and in a swirling pattern worked best for me. If you push to hard the surfaces will be missed by the bristle tips and wont scrub right. Using LATA foams like mad, so if you need to see, just dip it back into the chemical again. More pics
Before

During

After (note I discovered that the cheap spray paints (I personally love them but didnt know this until now) actually stain the plastic. Youll see on the white ones the minis are bare plastic, but the black primed ones are stained black)

Ok after the scrub I put the minis in a tank with soapy water to help rinse the LATA off the minis. Pretty simple

Now onto cleaning. As always when you strip minis, youll want to clean them off and let them dry completely before doing anything with them. Nothing is more annoying then trying to prime something and have it ruined because there was residue left on the mini, that just means ANOTHER chemical bath. So get yourself another container or wash the previous one out. I put some warm soapy water into it for a rinse. Then scrub the mini briefly with the toothbrush. Then rinse it in the soapy water. Then let it air dry.
PICS!

OOOHH! So clean!

Thats basically it. Now as I said I did the plastic, the metal AND 1 lucky fella that had the minwax treatment (I tested one the wife practiced on to see how dipping panned out. Not for me) The plastic and metal came out beautifully. The ONLY problems I ran into was it seems to dissolve super glue a tad. The guy I got these from was not very good at bonding so the flayed ones lost some hands, the Immortal was 1 handing his gauss blaster and so on. Not a big deal really.

MinWax and you!
LATA actually does minwax with ease as well. But it takes a longer soak. At a full day I got it from this:

To this

Obviously the crevices will take more soaking, Id bet once MAYBE twice more and this will be cleaned. Im sure its because the minwax is REALLY thick at these spots. But still, in 1 day you can get a MINWAX army to that, a hell of alot better then the usual 3+ days.

SO! There you have it. I paid $3 for the big jug, and a buck for the toothbrush. And I stripped all this

To this

In around 24 hours. Best part is, I barely used the LATA, Ive still got a ton of it left over. Only side effects Im feeling from it, is I feel like Ive left my hand in a bath tub for a day, and that is a weird feeling. So you dont even need gloves and the like (unless your prone to skin irritation from chemicals) the only warning it has is not to get it into your eyes.....duh. Ok DAKKA, enjoy it, enjoy being a cheap ass, enjoy painting a new army

found this stuff about a month ago and stripped about 2 companies of marines down to the plastic.

It's an absolute god-send.

Best stuff on the market today to use, bar none.

**Chewbacca**

It seems to work no better than the pine-sol i use. One of my biggest annoyances when stripping paint is getting in really deep crevices. I'm curious what happens chemically to that area when left uncleaned because I feel like you don't want to prime the model until every last bit of old paint is off, else have issues with the paint falling off on thew model. Can anyone confirm this?

**Commissar_Tiberius**

I have been suffering with these ketchup and mustard painted orks for too long. Ruined one in Acetone (Defft Choppa).... Now that I am getting back into Orks I tried Fantastic - Simple Green and was about to get Super Clean But there is a Dollar Mania Store next to my Walmart and now am going to gram this stuff instead. BTW half of them have a gloss green coat on them. Wish me luck !!!!

**KingCracker**

Good luck buddy. The ones that have that gloss on there, might need another soak after your first cleaning, the terminator Sgt I did had some floor finish over it, took a couple soaks, but I did end up getting it all off.

As for the paint that sticks in the deep crevices, your going to need a pick to dig it out. Think about it, paint pools in the low spots, and those crevices are not only low, but deep, AND narrow, so the paint is really thick as well as has lots of area to stick to. But soaking and then brushing the paint off, will soften those spots up, then just pick it out and your golden.

**Sean_OBrien**

Chewbacca wrote:It seems to work no better than the pine-sol i use. One of my biggest annoyances when stripping paint is getting in really deep crevices. I'm curious what happens chemically to that area when left uncleaned because I feel like you don't want to prime the model until every last bit of old paint is off, else have issues with the paint falling off on thew model. Can anyone confirm this?

Regarding paint that is left on, you have two issues.

The first is that there is still paint there - adding more paint will make it thicker and can lead to obscured details. Quite often, it is in areas that are not immediately problematic, however - sometimes they are covering more important detail locations like emblems and what not.

The other problem is quite often the paint has absorbed some of the stripper. If you try to paint over it before it has had time to fully dry again - the residual stripper can cause the new paint to bubble, fog, glaze or do some other unexpected thing.

Normally though, as long as you let them dry for a week or so before you attempt to paint them again - the paint that remained stuck in place will still remain stuck in place and any paint you put on it will stick to it just fine.

Regarding LA's - it really isn't anything special from what I have seen. It works well enough, but there are plenty of other cleaners that work as well - and many which even work better. The primary workhorse chemical in its formulation is 2-Butoxyethanol. You find that in about half of the various organic degreasers out there (including Simple Green). While it is generally considered to be safe - it does have an LD50 number, which means that given enough exposure - it will kill you dead. The rest of it are mixes of fairly common surfactants and detergents which have minimal impact on paint (trisodium phosphate and ethoxylated alcohol for example). Simple Green actually has a higher concentration of the 2-Butoxyethanol than LAs - so if you were to actually do a blind side by side test - it should come out the winner between the two.

For me - I still prefer Super Clean or Oven Cleaner. Wear gloves and you are golden. Works on metal, plastic, resin - dissolves any paint that you will find. Works fast, and the chemicals have been in use for a few hundred years so you don't have these new studies popping up linking them to tumors and what not. After I get everything mostly clean - if there are some problem areas, I use an air eraser to get into the cracks and remove the last bits mechanically.

**Deathshead420**

Well I can tell you without bias it does not work as well, and doesn't cost nearly as much.

**gorgon**

Sean_OBrien wrote:Regarding LA's - it really isn't anything special from what I have seen. It works well enough, but there are plenty of other cleaners that work as well - and many which even work better. The primary workhorse chemical in its formulation is 2-Butoxyethanol. You find that in about half of the various organic degreasers out there (including Simple Green). While it is generally considered to be safe - it does have an LD50 number, which means that given enough exposure - it will kill you dead. The rest of it are mixes of fairly common surfactants and detergents which have minimal impact on paint (trisodium phosphate and ethoxylated alcohol for example). Simple Green actually has a higher concentration of the 2-Butoxyethanol than LAs - so if you were to actually do a blind side by side test - it should come out the winner between the two.

There's clearly something more to it than that, because that doesn't line up in any way with my tests and real-world experiences. I recently stripped some Shrikes I picked up at an auction. Days of soaking in undiluted Simple Green only barely budged the paint, while the same soak time in undiluted LA's got it done. Before that, I tried some ancient RT-era IG plastics...again, Simple Green had mediocre results while LA's got them almost completely clean down to the plastic. I'm confident I could keep repeating these results.

I've been stripping miniatures for 15+ years and have tried virtually everything at one point or another. I'd put LA's performance on par with brake fluid, but obviously without the disposal issues.

**Acardia**

This stuff has been my go to for cleaning plastic, for metal I go straight to pine-sol.

**Sean_OBrien**

gorgon wrote:There's clearly something more to it than that, because that doesn't line up in any way with my tests and real-world experiences.

If there is - they've got some 'splaining to do.

From their Totally Awesome MSDS (http://www.midlandtool.com/MSDS/L.A.%20Totally%20Awesome%20Cleaner.pdf)

0.01-2.5% - Orange Oil Blend (CAS# 8008-57-9) & (CAS#111-76-2)
0.5-4% - Ethoxylated Alcohol (CAS# 9036-19-5)
0.5-2% - Disodium Salt (CAS# 6834-92-0)
0.5-2% - Phosphate Sodium (CAS# 7601-54-9)
0.5-0.8% - Hydroxy Sodium (CAS# 1310-73-2)
88-98% - Water

All percentages by weight. The first component is Orange Sweet Oil (CAS# 8008-57-9). It is used for flavoring and aromatherapy as well as as a fragrance additive to soaps to cover up other chemical smells which might be present and not wanted. The second component is 2-Butoxyethanol (CAS#111-76-2) - as mentioned, it is an organic solvent which works on paints and lacquers and is the primary component in Simple Green. The third component is polyoxyethylene octyl phenyl ether - it is primarily a surfactant...that is it is used to reduce the surface tension and help to get under the paint. The fourth component is a detergent auxiliaries, primarily used for its oil absorbing properties (remember - this is a degreaser). It also is a dye auxillary - which may explain some of the staining which occurs on miniatures stripped with TA. The fifth component is Trisodium phosphate. TSP is a common degreaser used to clean various surfaces prior to painting them (you can find big buckets of TSP at DIY stores in their paint departments). The 6th component is sodium hydroxide - the good stuff that lets Super Clean and Oven cleaner eat through paint...and your skin. Finally - there is the water...which doesn't do much at all but act as a carrier for everything.

Simple Greens MSDS (http://www.simplegreen.com/pdfs/MSDS_EN-US_AllPurposeCleaner.pdf)

≥78% - Water
≤5% - 2-butoxyethanol (CAS# 111-76-2)
≤5% - Ethoxylated Alcohol (CAS# 68439-46-3)
≤5% - Tetrapotassium Pyrophosphate (CAS# 7320-34-5)
≤5% - Sodium Citrate (CAS# 68-04-2)
≤1% - Fragrance
≤1% - Colorant

Now, you have water first - which again, is just a carrier. After that you have the 2-butoxyethanol - same as TA, though at higher concentrations. Then you have another Ethoxylated Alcohol - different formula, same purpose though. Simple Greens ethoxylated alcohol has additional foaming properties though, which help to lift stuff with agitation (either brushing or ultrasonic). TA uses the disodium salt in addition to their EA to match the properties of the EA used by SG. The Tetrapotassium pyrophosphate is used as a degreaser and is comparable to the TSP used in TA. The trisodium citrate is used as a PH buffer, preventing breakdown of the components over time. The fragrance and colorant serve the same purpose as the sweet orange oil in the TA.

In terms of what is there and not there - the only real kicker is with the Sodium Hydroxide (which is probably the best paint stripper you will find). It is in such low concentrations though, that I would be surprised if it had that much added impact. But, if it is in fact doing the extra work - why bother with going in for halves when you can get the whole thing. Super Clean, Oven Cleaner, Purple Power and others all are Sodium Hydroxide based cleaners that work in minutes or hours as opposed to days.

**Deathshead420**

why bother with going in for halves when you can get the whole thing

For 1$?

**Sean_OBrien**

Cheapest I have seen LA's TA was $5 for a 32 ounce container. Purple Power goes for $5 for a gallon. Since there are 128 ounces per gallon - that would be 4 of the LATA for the same volume... Purple Power wins.

I buy my Super Clean in 2.5 gallon containers for $23 each. That would be 10 bottles of the LATA for the same volume... Super Clean wins.

If I managed to find it in the 64 ounce containers that the OP mentioned and could get it at the price he mentioned ($3 each) it would end up costing a dollar more than the gallon of Purple Power and about $7 less than the Super Clean. However, since I generally only have to soak the miniatures for 4 hours or so in Super Clean and it removes it down to bare material in a single go - the extra few bucks are worth it IMO.

**Deathshead420**

They sell LA's TA at the dollar tree bruv.

**Robbo97**

What About Australia!

**TigerLightning**

This stuff works awesome. It even stripped clear gloss nail polish.

**hivepdktyrant**

Break Fluid (automotive) has been a common paint stripper for model railroading for many years. You do have to be careful with some plastics.

**NickTheButcher**

This thread was freaking AMAZING.

Simple Green didn't do

to strip my marines. Soaked for 3 days and there were several that still weren't stripping.

When to the Dollar store to see if they carried this, and low and behold it was there!

Threw them bad boys in to the new mix and BLAM! 12 hours later it took them down to bare plastic.

THIS ACTUALLY REMOVED KRYLON FUSION.

I couldn't be happier.

Many thanks to the OP!!

**MarkyMark**

Revenent Reiko wrote:
SilverMK2 wrote:
Revenent Reiko wrote:but i have a tutorial for Dettol which apparently works great so thats the way for me i think

Do you know what particular version of dettol you need?

The original (brown liquid) version
here

Use fairy power spray, same price as dettol but have the amount BUT it doesnt smell at all, while dettol will make your minis smell for at least a month after

**eisenhorn40k**

Awesome,

I horribly messed up my new army and this looks like the perfect way to get them re-painted now that i know what I'm going for!

**Adam LongWalker**

Well I have posted my results earlier on this topic with pictures of the results with the models I have stripped.

I have been using all sorts of methods of stripping models for the past 35+ years. I've also painted houses, cars, motorcycles, HO scale trains, (and so on) besides miniatures. Yup, looked and researched all of the products listed for my use and it comes down the this.

LA Awesome, which is reusable, does 90% of all of my needs. For my usage it is safer than the other cleaners I have used for stripping plastic (and metal) models.

The other 10% of cleaning issues, I use 91%( have 99% as well) of isopropyl alcohol as well well a ultrasonic cleaner.

LA Awesome to me simply works.

**KingCracker**

NickTheButcher wrote:
This thread was freaking AMAZING.

Simple Green didn't do to strip my marines. Soaked for 3 days and there were several that still weren't stripping.

When to the Dollar store to see if they carried this, and low and behold it was there!

Threw them bad boys in to the new mix and BLAM! 12 hours later it took them down to bare plastic.

THIS ACTUALLY REMOVED KRYLON FUSION.

I couldn't be happier.

Many thanks to the OP!!

Why, your very welcome

**Zande4**

Eldar Man wrote:
What About Australia!

Use ebay or Dettol or wait for my little science experiment to finish.

I'm using 5 various cleaning products on some lord of the rings minis which i don't care if they melt! they have been painted for nearly 10 years and have had it caked on really badly.
I'm going to leave them for 24 hours and see what works the best. For the record I'm using 1: Domestos, 2: Handy Andy, 3: Pino Clean, 4: Cleaning Vinegar, 5: Earth Choice Cleaner.
I will let you know how it goes!

**Plumbumbarum**

Edited by AgeOfEgos

**kcwm**

I'm going to be stripping some Death Company that the previous owner painted white. I'll be sure to post before and after pictures.

As for super glue becoming looser, I find that I ran into this far more with the thinner Necron models than I did with Marine sized models.

**Zande4**

Hey I just bought some of this from ebay for my poorly painted nid models and I am just wondering if its safe with forge world resin and also the yellow stuff that the hierophants torso is made of?

**Deepstrike BA**

awesome

**ElectricPaladin**

I've found that Simple Green is great for getting rid of the paint, but struggles with the primer. Right now I've got some models sitting in LATA - we'll see where it goes.

Already, I'm a little dubious because after twelve hours, my plastic tub doesn't look anything like KingCrackers. The LATA is still clear, and although the paint looks a little loose, it doesn't seem to be dispersing on its own, as it did in KingCracker's photos. In fact, it looks... just like they do in Simple Green.

I'll give 'em a good scrub in a little while and see how that works.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Forget I said anything. I was wrong - terribly, terribly wrong.

I just went back to the models and peered at them in better light. Then I stirred them. And woah... paint came flying off them. It's a paintastrophe in there. A paintsaccre. It's paintful to look at.

This sh*t is for real.

**KingCracker**

ElectricPaladin wrote:I've found that Simple Green is great for getting rid of the paint, but struggles with the primer. Right now I've got some models sitting in LATA - we'll see where it goes.

Already, I'm a little dubious because after twelve hours, my plastic tub doesn't look anything like KingCrackers. The LATA is still clear, and although the paint looks a little loose, it doesn't seem to be dispersing on its own, as it did in KingCracker's photos. In fact, it looks... just like they do in Simple Green.

I'll give 'em a good scrub in a little while and see how that works.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Forget I said anything. I was wrong - terribly, terribly wrong.

I just went back to the models and peered at them in better light. Then I stirred them. And woah... paint came flying off them. It's a paintastrophe in there. A paintsaccre. It's paintful to look at.

This sh*t is for real.

Indeed it is. LATA is an excellent AND CHEAP paint stripper.

Forge World resin - I havnt personally tested this on resins, but someone somewhere in these pages mentioned they tried it out on resins and it worked a charm. But since I havnt personally tried it out, I cant vouch for the results. As always. test it out on some sprue or a bit or something