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I know, these are done to death, and there's a standard answer set that goes something like:

US -> Simple Green, Super Clean (Purple Power) for plastics
UK -> Fairly Power, Dettol for plastics
OZ -> Still waiting for someone to tell me.

For metals we'll start getting Brake Fluid, Acetone, Oven Cleaner, etc.

But today I found some claims for something that doesn't pop-up in our standard lists "Dawn Power Dissolver". Apparently it's a Gel based cleaner that that's safe on plastics and three to four times more powerful than anything we've been suggesting. Here's a link to a blooger's 24 dip test comparisons http://youngwolf7.com/?page_id=3032.

Anyone here have any experience with this? UK/OZ people, can you get it where you live?

Bounty wrote:
US -> Simple Green, Super Clean (Purple Power) for plastics
UK -> Fairly Power, Dettol for plastics
OZ -> Still waiting for someone to tell me.

Sorry for the hijack, but does anyone know an equivalent to these products available in Germany?

Cheers,


IK-Painter

Super Clean and Purple Power are sold differently, im not sure if they are made by the same company. that being said Super Clean is the best of the 3 and i would be suprised if anything works faster or better than it. i can usually strip a model clean in a few hours.

i will also mention i am using Super Clean in a large 6L ultrasonic cleaner.

after reading the blog i disagree with the cons of Super Clean i have used the same tub of fluid for several months and things still come out with bare plastic. i even had some minis sitting in Purple Power that was over a year old that still came out clean.

Super Clean can also remove car primer which things like Simple Green could only dream to remove.

Deathklaat wrote:Super Clean and Purple Power are sold differently, im not sure if they are made by the same company. that being said Super Clean is the best of the 3 and i would be suprised if anything works faster or better than it. i can usually strip a model clean in a few hours.

i will also mention i am using Super Clean in a large 6L ultrasonic cleaner.

after reading the blog i disagree with the cons of Super Clean i have used the same tub of fluid for several months and things still come out with bare plastic. i even had some minis sitting in Purple Power that was over a year old that still came out clean.

Super Clean can also remove car primer which things like Simple Green could only dream to remove.

Super Clean and Purple Power are from different companies, but if you read the MSDS for each you'll see they're almost identical Chemically.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

IK-Painter wrote:

Bounty wrote:
US -> Simple Green, Super Clean (Purple Power) for plastics
UK -> Fairly Power, Dettol for plastics
OZ -> Still waiting for someone to tell me.

Sorry for the hijack, but does anyone know an equivalent to these products available in Germany?

Cheers,
IK-Painter

I would assume Dettol is Dettol in both the UK and Germany. I know Simple Gree and Super Clean are virtually impossible to find outside of North America, and have no equivalent.

Pine sol for metal always for me.

I've heard a lot of good things about purple power, but since it's not available in my part of the world, I've been trying to find a similar product. To that end, I've tried to locate a list of ingredients online, but to no avail. Even the MSDS from the manufacturer's web site only lists a few ingredients.

If there's a list of ingredients on the bottle itself, could someone be kind enough to post them here?

Isopropyl alcohol has always been my go-to. It strips everything efficiently with zero chance of melting on anything. Plus, it doesn't smell bad, not that harmful and pretty much easy to find. And you can use it on important things like disinfecting wounds (caused by modelling mishaps, perhaps), disinfecting hands, disinfecting keyboards and mouse, cleaning computer screens, a moisture remover... among other things.

industrial purple on plastics and metal...you can use brake fluid on plastics as well....but make sure it's dot 3...dot 4 will eat it

I also tried graffiti remover on a metal model with a plastic backpack...poor back pack didn't make it lol

Ive used purple power, though I havent had the success some claim (removing models as bear plastic) Overall its been pretty good, gets about 90% of the primer coat off.

No one's got anything to say about "Dawn Power Dissolver"? Apparently it's a Gel based cleaner that that's safe on plastics.

There is also a lengthy thread in tutorials about a stripper that is safe for pastics available in US dollar stores not mentioned above. Works very well from reports in the thread (and personal experience)

I've been using Simple Green on plastics and FW resin. It's awesome, cleans everything off, even primer and makes your miniatures smell minty fresh!!

It will soften FW resin a bit though.

Update: its LAs Totally Awesome, available in dollar stores

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/365067.page

Figured I'd throw in my tree fiddy. On the recommendation of the blog link i purchased 2 bottles of dawn super dissolver and a gallon tupperware container. I knew that the 2 containers of dawn came out to less than a quart, but it was a good shape and I figured "Hey, I have a TON of models I need to strip, it'll displace enough that it should be an issue!" Nope... BUT, it turns out that the gel nature of the product is to my advantage, as even though it barely covers 1/4 of the minis in there in depth, theres a noticeable coating of it on EVERYTHING (particularly after the good shaking I gave it, probably broke a bunch of plastic minis buuut... oh well... I figure it will do just fine if i give it in a nice shakeup every few hours... and this stuff WORKS! The metal minis are already showing bear metal only 30-45 mins later!

Dettol antiseptic works wonders in australia. The brown antiseptic not the green hand sanitizer. Also handy when I slice my thumb open witha hobby knife!

SImple green doesn't hold a candle to Drano. Drano does in an hour what takes Simple Green over a day, or sometimes forever!

I tried to strip the paint off a Leman Russ using Simple Green; completely immersed the whole thing in a small tub of it for a week - stirring every few hours when I was awake. Barely worked at all, only was able to scrub about 5-10% of the paint off. Then I tried Drano Max Gel or whatever it's called. Had it in there for an hour, pulled it out, the paint was dripping off as I was pulling it out. Washup was a bit more tedious, but for non-vehicles, not much of a difference.

The only Con I can see, is it can be somewhat hazardous to work with. So, do wear gloves and eye protection of sorts, in case there's some splattering.

heartserenade wrote:Isopropyl alcohol has always been my go-to. It strips everything efficiently with zero chance of melting on anything. Plus, it doesn't smell bad, not that harmful and pretty much easy to find. And you can use it on important things like disinfecting wounds (caused by modelling mishaps, perhaps), disinfecting hands, disinfecting keyboards and mouse, cleaning computer screens, a moisture remover... among other things.

Just a word of warning about IPA. Is highly flammable, so no smoking around the stuff.

Sorry, we just had a lab fire at work with some IPA, so felt it should be mentioned.

silent25 wrote:

heartserenade wrote:Isopropyl alcohol has always been my go-to. It strips everything efficiently with zero chance of melting on anything. Plus, it doesn't smell bad, not that harmful and pretty much easy to find. And you can use it on important things like disinfecting wounds (caused by modelling mishaps, perhaps), disinfecting hands, disinfecting keyboards and mouse, cleaning computer screens, a moisture remover... among other things.

Just a word of warning about IPA. Is highly flammable, so no smoking around the stuff.

Sorry, we just had a lab fire at work with some IPA, so felt it should be mentioned.

Well I certainly hope no one is dumb enough to smoke when working with anything with oil or alcohols.

Oz:

Dettol is alright
Simple Green is better (It is available in certain Bunnings', but it is not on their online store so you will have to look for the cleaning products section. Most should have it, mine didn't have knedatites other than Knead-It yet it had Simple Green. It is $5/L, so it is also cheaper than dettol and safer to use).

That being said, we don't have arts and crafts big franchised chains so we use expensive local or slightly cheaper imports, whereas US has something called Michael's.

Shaozun wrote:Oz:

Dettol is alright
Simple Green is better (It is available in certain Bunnings', but it is not on their online store so you will have to look for the cleaning products section. Most should have it, mine didn't have knedatites other than Knead-It yet it had Simple Green. It is $5/L, so it is also cheaper than dettol and safer to use).

That being said, we don't have arts and crafts big franchised chains so we use expensive local or slightly cheaper imports, whereas US has something called Michael's.

Wait, why is dettol dangerous to use?

Unless you like a smoko while you strip models or have a tendency to swig medicinal Alcohol, Dettol is not dangerous - it does not damage models either. I've not been painting for about three months - the models in my dettol bath is fine.

QLD does have a franchise art store, called Riot. It stocks white spirits, oil paints and artists chalk - everything you need for weathering.

Scipio Africanus wrote:

Shaozun wrote:Oz:

Dettol is alright
Simple Green is better (It is available in certain Bunnings', but it is not on their online store so you will have to look for the cleaning products section. Most should have it, mine didn't have knedatites other than Knead-It yet it had Simple Green. It is $5/L, so it is also cheaper than dettol and safer to use).

That being said, we don't have arts and crafts big franchised chains so we use expensive local or slightly cheaper imports, whereas US has something called Michael's.

Wait, why is dettol dangerous to use?

Unless you like a smoko while you strip models or have a tendency to swig medicinal Alcohol, Dettol is not dangerous - it does not damage models either. I've not been painting for about three months - the models in my dettol bath is fine.

QLD does have a franchise art store, called Riot. It stocks white spirits, oil paints and artists chalk - everything you need for weathering.

Dettol can de-fat your hands. Its not a nice thing to happen. It's not 100% safe, but allot safer than brake fluid or drain cleaner (both of which i have used).

chaos0xomega wrote:Figured I'd throw in my tree fiddy. On the recommendation of the blog link i purchased 2 bottles of dawn super dissolver and a gallon tupperware container. I knew that the 2 containers of dawn came out to less than a quart, but it was a good shape and I figured "Hey, I have a TON of models I need to strip, it'll displace enough that it should be an issue!" Nope... BUT, it turns out that the gel nature of the product is to my advantage, as even though it barely covers 1/4 of the minis in there in depth, theres a noticeable coating of it on EVERYTHING (particularly after the good shaking I gave it, probably broke a bunch of plastic minis buuut... oh well... I figure it will do just fine if i give it in a nice shakeup every few hours... and this stuff WORKS! The metal minis are already showing bear metal only 30-45 mins later!

Awesome! DO we have an update on how it went?

opelblitz wrote:SImple green doesn't hold a candle to Drano. Drano does in an hour what takes Simple Green over a day, or sometimes forever!

Any chance of damaging the plastic/loosing details if you leave it longer than an hour? Is there a "Max time" that you can leave the plastic in the cleaner for?

Yep, I let the minis soak for 24 hours, most of the paint on my minis washed right off, and in most of the (very few) instances where it didn't all come right off, a light scrubbing with a toothbrush did the trick. A few of the minis will require a second treatment, as they are still left with large chunks of difficult to remove paint, but these minis are the ones that were sitting the highest in my tub, so they didn't get to properly soak (is my guess).

All in all, I highly recommend it, if you don't have a lot to do, its definitely the easiest stripping method I know of (I've used purple power but it never gets it all off, you know?). If you have to strip a large amount of minis, well you're going to need to invest in 3 or 4 bottles of the stuff easily, possibly more :/

Also, I've noticed that some of the minis (most if not all) still smell like the stuff, so they are going to require some soaking in water to clean properly I guess.

Pinesol also works wonders on metal minis for me.

Pinsol leaves your models with a tree stink and its slow at what it does, plus it will ruin plastic models so its not as much as a universal cleaner as other methods.

well i have had some requests to strip some models i am selling so i will make a thread on stripping with an ultrasonic cleaner.

i will be able to show how well Super Clean works in a short amount of time.

models that are going to take a swim.

a 3rd ed metal Khorne Bezerker that Pinsol had failed to strip 100%

some 3rd ed plastic Khorne Bezerkers/bits in various stages of painting, some stuff is just in old white primer

some plastic Dire Avengers that were painted a few years ago

a metal Eldar HQ painted the same time as the DA

a plastic CSM Rhino that i have n oidea when or what it was painted or primered with.

Hi folks,

I'd love some advice on the following:

Mini: Scibor Miniature Roman General (Resin)

I'm not sure what paint stripper to use. I'm based in the UK and as this was an expensive mini I don't want to ruin all the intricate detail.

Can someone recommend a suitable product?

Thanks,

NC.