An Interesting Data Point About Stripping Miniatures

It's Alive! IT'S ALIVE!
Originally uploaded by The Gonk

So, a long while back, I picked up some Wargames Foundry pirates and the Treasure Island characters. They were primed and painted pretty roughly, so I dropped them in a Mason jar full of Pine-Sol to strip the paint off. Not too much later, I decided to strip some Tau Pathfinders and Kryomek Talos units I had bouncing around, and dropped them in a Mason jar of Simple Green. Then I pretty much forgot about them. For, near as I can guess, two or three years.



Yeah. Pretty sad. So I was looking at them the other day, and got to wondering...what, exactly, happens when you leave a figure in Pine-Sol or Simple Green for two years? I mean, lead is pretty durable stuff, but it's not indestructible. I started having some ill thoughts that maybe these miniatures were ruined somehow sitting in these chemical solutions for so long. So, I decided to take them out.

How does a lead figure look after two years in Pine-Sol? Well, they seem just fine. They look like I just dropped them in. In fact, I can't even say they were stripped any better after two years in Pine-Sol than they were after two days in Pine-Sol. I still had to scrub paint and pick it out of crevasses with toothpicks. For the love of god, random eBay seller, what are you painting your figures with that your black paint was still solid after two years in Pine-Sol? Sheesh.