My final squad of miniatures from the First Strike starter set did not begin well. I had spray-primed them black alongside my Reivers, but after base coating those by hand in red I wanted to try a second layer of spray paint for the Intercessors. Unfortunately, my can of Mephiston Red was inadequately shaken on a hot, sunny dry and held too far away… with the result that the miniatures ended up with a horrible, grainy texture which would come away at the gentlest touch. They were ruined!
Well, not quite. I knew how to remove paint from old-school metal miniatures, and that it was possible to do the same on plastic – just not with acetone.
The most time consuming part of painting this squad was, ironically enough, figuring out how to remove that bad paint job whilst living in a country where I am wholly unable to read the small print on bottles of domestic chemicals. I bought three different products and tested them in parallel; a fine application of the scientific method except that none of them worked at all. Eventually I learned where I could buy 99.9% isopropyl alcohol, and bought a rather small and expensive bottle of a product designed for cleaning muck off vinyl records. Fortunately this stuff did the trick, and after a few soak & scrub sessions I had almost all the paint off.
