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I've been dilligently removing old pain from minis over the last few weeks while I prep them for sale and I noticed that some of them go dull in the Simple Gree solution where the metal as oxidized a little. Older ones seem to be the problem, especially if you leave some in longer than 24 hours. I also use cocktail sticks as a non abrasive way of getting into all the corners and details.

While dull minis aren't the end of the world, I wanted to create a better basecoat for the new primer and found a little tip that I wanted to share.

I used some Blu-Tac or Poster Putty and made a small ball and wiped the miniature with it fairly robustly, but carefully in areas of detail. You will notice the oxide come off into the Putty and the miniature will get much brighter, in fact some of them look too good to paint now!

No need to go overboard, but enough so you have a metallic base is more than enough. I think the putty also acts as a degreaser, but I wash them anyway with detergent prior to priming for great even results.

Hope this is helpful.

That's pretty interesting, and definitely helpful. Never would have thought to do that. Thanks for posting!

AS you say simple green works well but have found oxidation this may be because this is citric based cleaner .I use stand ed lacquer thinner on my metal minis but only on metal ones

I just tried it out with putty and an old white soft eraser. Perfect!

Thanks for this tip. I've been having this issue too.

Try just using Dettol, i haven't had any probs as yet!

Very interesting discovery. I've stripped hundreds of figs and commonly they get dull as you describe. However, I've never found it to impact the durrability of paintjobs put on after stripping the figs.

For reselling of figures though, where appearance really counts, it could be of great value!

Can you show an example of the blu-tacking process like a before and after shot of the minature?