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Having just indulged in a marathon disassembly, stripping and clean up session the state of some of the stuff I've been dealing with really makes me wonder who had it before

I understand people who don't bother cleaning up mould lines or drilling out gun barrels,

if all they're doing is playing they probably don't even notice

but leaving 1cm long chunks of sprue attached to your painted mini ? weird

and superglue, a real step forward for quickly fitting stuff together, but some minis look as if they were dipped in superglue and rolled in the bit's box (strangely there were totally free of mould lines and reasonably well painted too

If you think buying used minis leaves you with questions, wait until you buy a house.

Our prior owners had drilled a hole in a wall in the living room, and ran an extension cord into the basement instead of wiring a new socket.

I've had the strange situation of coming up against minis that I'd sold to some stranger on ebay and then getting beaten by them!

The shame of getting beaten by troops that were once yours...

When in doubt, assume it's models owned by 10 year olds that their parents have discovered in a box and are flogging for space.

I had a friend who just didn't care about leaving chunks of sprue. I pity whoever bought his stuff.

 Redbeard wrote:
If you think buying used minis leaves you with questions, wait until you buy a house.

Our prior owners had drilled a hole in a wall in the living room, and ran an extension cord into the basement instead of wiring a new socket.

I saw this in a handful of houses too during my house hunt. There was one where i literally could not figure out how they had done it. Hole was drilled just large enough for the cord, so the plug head was out of the floor, but plug head couldn't fit through. I checked the hole and the extension cord - the hole hadn't been filled in at all, and the cord hadn't had the head stripped and rewired. I was baffled.

I also didn't buy the house.


I do engage in second hand minis market. Most of the time i just assume whatever i get is going to be a completely hot mess, and toss them in a bath of Purple Power the moment they show up. Sometimes i am happily surprised - i once traded with a guy for some "painted" GK terminators. They showed up, and i swear, these had to be a professional commission from the quality. Other than that, though, into the perple drank they go.

 Redbeard wrote:
If you think buying used minis leaves you with questions, wait until you buy a house.

Our prior owners had drilled a hole in a wall in the living room, and ran an extension cord into the basement instead of wiring a new socket.

My house was New on Sprue.

 Redbeard wrote:
If you think buying used minis leaves you with questions, wait until you buy a house.

Our prior owners had drilled a hole in a wall in the living room, and ran an extension cord into the basement instead of wiring a new socket.

My wife and I moved into a new house where the circuit breaker box in the basement is in a shower.

Back on topic though, yeah, this frequently happens when I buy used minis. When i purchased a lot of Space Marines, they all came painted brown-and-poop green, with little pot leaves as a chapter symbol.

I've had some awful second hand lots, so i pretty mcuch will only go for unassembled/ unpainted stuff these days. Sometimes the work that has to go into cleaning them isn't worth the money saved.

It also amazes me how the smell of cigerette smoke clings to plastic even after being stripped. I won a small lot of LOTR uruks which i just binned and cut my (only rather small) losses after the smell of the box they where in actually made me gag. Not only that but they look like they had been primmed with tar, having obviously been painted then re-sprayed to make them look new online. Thank god my winning bid was under a fiver.

I think that people should pass a class on proper Plastic glue use before using it on models(said with sarcasm). A fair share of my vehicles were 2nd,3rd, 7th hand and plastic glue was LAYERED on it, the plastic dried in literal waves across the hull.

 Jimsolo wrote:

 Redbeard wrote:
If you think buying used minis leaves you with questions, wait until you buy a house.

Our prior owners had drilled a hole in a wall in the living room, and ran an extension cord into the basement instead of wiring a new socket.

My wife and I moved into a new house where the circuit breaker box in the basement is in a shower.

Back on topic though, yeah, this frequently happens when I buy used minis. When i purchased a lot of Space Marines, they all came painted brown-and-poop green, with little pot leaves as a chapter symbol.

That reminds me of a friend who tried to get into the hobby (2001ish so about 11 years old) when i first did, a friend of his dad's managed to get him a tonne of brand new Orks on the cheap. I knew he didn;t have the attention span for the hobby, and sure enough he painted them them with pound shop craft paints and moddeled little spliffs out of blu-tac (covered in varnish) there was also a few dreads and killa kans assembled with No-More-Nails (I don't know a US equivalent, but you use it to put shelves up)

So in answer to the original question, if you are wondering who previously owned those badly assembled minis, its probably a 12 year old with the attention span of a goldfish.

 Redbeard wrote:
If you think buying used minis leaves you with questions, wait until you buy a house.

Our prior owners had drilled a hole in a wall in the living room, and ran an extension cord into the basement instead of wiring a new socket.

I have to agree!

Previous owner of my home ran a hose from the laundry room, around 30 feet of basement, and out a window instead if spending $100 to get the rear faucet fixed. Among other things...

Previous owners here cut 12"x6" rectangle in the floor to install a air vent he never installed, a literall rectangle hole strait to the basement. then covered the hole with carpet and nothing else. Care to guess how I found this little gem?

A couple of times I've got (what I thought were) bargains off ebay only to have to spend money buying bits to replace things where the detail is ruined by the liberal application of superglue, or because I've caused damage trying to prize stuff apart that was glued together in a weird way, and ended up spending more money than it'd cost to buy new.

I treat pictures on ebay with a lot more scrutiny now.

 conker249 wrote:
Previous owners here cut 12"x6" rectangle in the floor to install a air vent he never installed, a literall rectangle hole strait to the basement. then covered the hole with carpet and nothing else. Care to guess how I found this little gem?

Ha ha ha! That's awful.

Have I told you about our garage, conker? The garage is a new addition...to a side of the house with windows. So two of the windows to the house open into a moldy, disgusting garage. I don't know what the previous owners were thinking.

Ooh, thought of another pre owned mini story. I have a tank (pics of it in my gallery, actually) where the paint on it was so thick I couldn't get it off with a chisel and a three day soak in Simple Green. I ended up just spraying the whole thing metallic green and calling it a wash.

I love how this turned into the new house thread! LOL at Redbeard and Platuan4th!

I have picked up a few "used" models on ebay and at bins at GenCon. Biggest problem?

I ebay ordered some battletech guys from Australia and when they arrived they reeked of pot. There was actual trace amounts of ash in the box and it smelled like it'd been packaged in left over stuffing from Bob Marley's couch. Even after taking them out of the box the smell lingered on the model for weeks.

Amusingly it's the only package I've ever had from outside the US that was marked as having been opened for postal inspection (and I buy a ton of stuff from overseas). It likely had a sniffer dog hit on it and they checked it to see what was inside.


On the home front we discovered a gift from the previous owner, my house had a length of water pipe being held together by a ball of electrical tape. The connection didn't even have so much as a half turn of threading holding it together. I was running a new cable line with my dad and discovered it when I accidentally bumped the pipe and it began spraying water.

Same owner had also buried an electrical wire that ran out to our shed, they didn't use any conduit or romex and just buried the raw wire in the dirt which we found about 3 years later when we were using a rototiller to break up the garden. My dad got a rather nasty shock before the breaker blew.



.

I have a few where it looked decent enough on the blurry Ebay picture but it turned out in real life with a thick coat of car primer on it that wouldn't strip even with paint thinner!

I don't care. I just want the figures as cheap as possible. In most cases I am going to strip and convert them to my own standards anyway.

Re: 10 year old with models.

Got a box of these in a charity shop for 50p once. They were flooded with glue on the necks and waist. I managed to save the bodies and replace the heads.

Wow that is rough, the parts almost look like they were melted together.

My personal favorite is how nearly every second hand crisis suit is broken at the ankles. I've been collecting Tau a long time and only broke a suit at the ankle once, yet the overwhelming majority of the ones I've seen on ebay are all busted. What are people doing with them?

Don't give it much thought really. I've bought and stripped hundreds and hundreds of used figures and it's pretty common to find figures that were painted with chunks of sprue attached, huge mold lines left on, assembled with rubber cement or so much plastic solvent that the parts are blobbed together.

None of it really bothers me much as I generally pay so little that the few unrecoverable pieces don't matter and everything else is just a soak in purple power away from recovery.


As to houses, we found out that the mystery plug that we (I think) were told was to be plugged in in the winter to heat the pipes does not go to a heated pipe wrap. Rather it goes to an electric radiator that was just left sitting in the crawl space. I shudder to think about the fire that could have started. It was so far under the house that we didn't know it was there until putting in a new hardwood floor and replacing a piece of subfloor.

On the positive side, I cleaned it right up and my friend is now using it to heat the gaming room in his basement.

I bought a bunch of Leman Russ's off of Ebay... I've had to do a lot of work on all of them, one of them needed to be completely dismantled as it'd been slapped together rather poorly. There's another where it looks like they used a Melta to attach the sponsoons (carving those off was fun).

They all need more work but I got what I paid for. Cheap Russ's with Forgeworld turrets!

So I do think about it... but the thought is fleeting as I get down to brass tacks and dismantle the thing/strip it.

I can add my own 'new' house story to the mix

Taking a wash basin out of the bedroom, why bother capping off the water supply, just hammer a wine cork into the cut pipe and glob gloss paint over it

(found due to a damp patch on the wall, fortunately before the cork came out completely)

My big bucket of orks n things (now without the added bits of sprue) are now having a swim in some nice detol

except for the superglue specials that are resting in the freezer

I'm sure they'll all look a lot better tomorrow and project : Orks in Fancy Hats will have some more victims

I had some space marines from an auction that someone put together leaving the grips on the bolters attached (tucked behind the arms with grips molded on them). He also painted them with what looked like latex paint, and glued the shoulderpads on in a way that I can only describe as "upside down". He used plastic glue too.

I got them cheap and there were enough pewter marines in there that I think I still came out on top, but wtf?

I got some minis once that looked like they had been painted with latex housepaint. Couldn't even see the chainmail until it was stripped.
On the house stories side, i've been in this place for 25 years and i still find Lego bits on occasion from the kids who lived here before us. That and odd toy bits dug up from the garden.

I'd had shockers on both the mini and home front, but always drop anything straight in disinfectant. I had a friend who used to use his own blood as blood effect and aren't sure how popular this method is.

 snurl wrote:
I've been in this place for 25 years and i still find Lego bits on occasion from the kids who lived here before us. That and odd toy bits dug up from the garden.

Just think of the poor parents who buy all those toys....my son seems to lose between 5-10% of his smaller toys ever month and we don't even live in a big house.

I've not had any really bad ebay purchases. Obvious some horrific paintjobs and 'conversions' which were just random spikes glued on every slightly flat surface but nothing that some detol and a modelling knife couldn't fix. I did buy a batch of the old Mk1 Rhinos and they had at least 5 layers of paint, I think that they have seen a lot of tabletops over the years

I've purchased cheap minis I thought were HORRIBLE, until I stripped them. I had a 2nd edition Carnifex that was so blobbed-up with paint when I stripped it I found out it had AT LEAST 4 different paint jobs previously.


As far as homes go..... My home's previous owner thought he was a handy man, he wasn't. All lights in the basement are NOT grounded.

Basement bathroom is so narrow that to get to the toilet you must enter the room, close the door (that swings inward) and then get to the toilet. When he put the shower in he must not have noticed he put the vanity too close to where the shower door was installed, as it would hit when opened. So, rather than have the door swing outwards (as properly installed) he reversed the door and it now swings inwards. when the door swings inwards it blocks the shower nobs. In order to turn on the shower you must be IN the shower and stand in cold water. Also, those doors are designed to channel water back into the shower. With it on backwards it channels water OUT of the shower.

We also have a ceiling fan that is mounted on a box NOT rated to support the weight of a ceiling fan.

 Palindrome wrote:

 snurl wrote:
I've been in this place for 25 years and i still find Lego bits on occasion from the kids who lived here before us. That and odd toy bits dug up from the garden.

Just think of the poor parents who buy all those toys....my son seems to lose between 5-10% of his smaller toys ever month and we don't even live in a big house.

I've not had any really bad ebay purchases. Obvious some horrific paintjobs and 'conversions' which were just random spikes glued on every slightly flat surface but nothing that some detol and a modelling knife couldn't fix. I did buy a batch of the old Mk1 Rhinos and they had at least 5 layers of paint, I think that they have seen a lot of tabletops over the years

Check your cold air intake ducts for many suprises. They also turn up under heavy workbenches and wedged between moldings.