Soaking lead & pewter minis in Simple Green for a week now

[Silent Invader]

With regard to the smell, after stripping minis with Dettol I've put them in a sealed plastic bag full of flour, which seemed to help.

[Cait Sidhe]

There seem to be many products with that name. Do you have a picture of the bottle?

As Tactalvanic says, Biostrip20, this stuff:

[Argonor]

Does the small brass brush remove the painted without harming the detail of the mini?  I really could use a good brush to get all the paint out of the crevices -- toothbrush isn't cutting it... but it seems to be doing better each day I let it sit in the simple green.

Yes, I also use the brass brush when cleaning up plastics, it removes 'flossy' bits from places where the x-acto is not effective.

I started using it on 'restic' (Mantic) minis as someone pointed it out as a good means to get rid of all the 'floss' left over from scraping moldlines, but it works equally well on plastics.

The brass brushes I use are of the 'leather brush' type, look a bit like a large toothbrush, with rather thin bristles.

[Drunkendwarf]

There seem to be many products with that name. Do you have a picture of the bottle?

Last year I tried to order Biostrip20 from the UK but they didn't sent it to the Netherlands (the stores I looked). After some searching I found:
https://www.verftechnieken.nl/gronden-primen-ontvetten/abbondanza-bio-strip.html

a badly painted Uruk-Hai warrior from some years ago:


applied the stripper with a brush:


after half an hour used an old toothbrush to clean:

(the sword snapped at some stage; the miniature doesn't look clean in the picture but it was)

DJ

[Jennifer]

The paint is so stubborn.  I am pretty sure it was enamel (oil based).

So I have it soaking in mineral spirits now.  I'll check back in a week.  Shouldn't minieral spirits dissolve enamel fairly quickly?

They are all metal figurines so no worries there.  3 lead minis, 2 pewter.

[horridperson]

For figs that are metal or pewter I use a heavy body gel paint/furniture stripper I get at the hardware store.  The stuff is brutal and will burn through acrylics and enamels like nobody's business.  It is nasty stuff though.  Has a strong odour and will burn your hands if it gets on them and sits for more than a few seconds.  I keep a glass jar of it and drop metal models in and let them sit.  Depending on paint it will usually be off in an hour if you agitate with an old toothbrush or brush from a weapon cleaning kit (former is better because of stiff bristles) after pulling it out.  I manipulate the models with a metal spoon once they have gone in the drink and rinse them under running water as I brush them clean.

I use a Simple Green solution for plastics because the stripper is too harsh and eats plastic along with paint.  I hate stripping plastics because any methods I have tried take much longer and don\t have as effective a result.