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So a few months back I bought a bunch of preowned Marines in various states of painting (some grey plastic, some primed, some with a base coat etc) to strip and repaint (and clean mold lines as they were most certainly not done on them). At first this went fine, some of the models all of the primer didn't go off but meh, a bit of staining here and there, or a tiny bit of black on it I don't mind.

However, the handful I tossed in the stripper (Super Clean) at the start of May seem to be primed with some magical bs that won't remove. I have pulled them out, scrubbed them with a toothbrush several times, even bought an electric toothbrush and a newer brush, and scraped sections with a knife, and still most of the primer stays on. A Dreadnought I had in there had every single one of its glue joins melt away over the past month, the last ones going tonight. The previous owner of this model had primed, and in some cases painted, every single inward facing piece of this model - I have no clue what is going on with it, and why someone would go to all this trouble on it.

Out of some morbid curiosity I swapped out the stripper for a fresh bit of it, and threw in a few other models on the "to strip" pile along with the stubborn bits, just to see the comparison on the effectiveness of the stripper.

At this point, if when I check on the stuff in a few days none of the paint removes I'm going to give up and just work on it from there. I'm just curious as Super Clean has always done me well in the past, so its odd that a full month in it has done nothing to the primer, but has done its job on the base coat above and every single bit of glue on it.

So I suppose long ramble aside, has anybody else had any "feth it" moments with models, or went way farther than necessary on a project just to see what might happen?

Not too sure about when to give up, but as far as stripping is concerned you may want to take a look at this thread:

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/805459.page

I had a similar issue with a big batch of old metal squat models I bought about a year ago. I knew I had a ton of models to strip and so I thought I'd go the whole hog and get a cellulose paint stripper so I could get through it quickly. I started dipping them in batches and the first few that went in were only primed and not otherwise painted. The primer (some black, some white) came off in no time, with barely any scrubbing, leaving fresh shiny metal squats, so I moved onto the fully painted ones, which made up the bulk of the lot. Now, I don't know what the hell they'd been painted with, but that b*stard paint just wouldn't come off. It scrubbed off the uppermost surfaces with a bit of excessive elbow grease, but as soon as it went down into crevices (and not even that deep), it became stupidly difficult to get out. I ended up leaving them overnight in the thinner, then tried again the next day and it was barely any better. Another overnight with fresh thinner and it was still difficult to get out of the deeper recesses. Even after the two nights of soaking in the powerful thinner, it still took me three extra days of vigorous scrubbing to get them to a decent semblance of being cleaned up.

I have no idea what the hell that paint was, but I bet it was used to paint bridges.

As long as the primer isn’t too thick, then if Its that hard to get off, you may as well just leave it on. There is Definately a point at which it feels wasted and affects your happiness with the hobbying.

I agree with Flinty. I've had models where there was just some paint/primer that did not want to come up but when I primed & repainted the model, you couldn't even tell there was an issue.