i have some plastic and metal figs i need repainted, some look very prone to snapping bits off and i was wondering would stripping them (with dettol soln- its like simple green) or would just spray painting them black undercoat be better or almost as good?? pls help
Well, look at them. If the detail is obscured just a little bit by the paint on them now, you should strip them. Another coat of primer will obscure even more detail. That is the way I deterimine whether I need to strip them.
Strip 'em, but don't worry about going all the way back to the plastic. If you get the top layer or two of paint off that should be plenty, and that can be done fairly gently and easily. If bits breaks, its not such a big deal to reglue since you are repainting anyway. But if there is only a thin amount of paint on them, as mentioned above, you can probably get away with just painting over the top.
I normally just strip any metal figures, plastic can be a bit tricky as it can melt, as I found out... Well actually it made everything very weak and can snap and I normally use pine o clean which works great on metal figures but is weakening the plastic so I ended up losing three skinks to pine o clean so now only got nine , sorry I lost three ..
Strip metal figs with acetone, but only metal as acetone will DESTROY plastic. I use Superclean on plastic and it works well, I can leave minis in it for days with no damage but it does dissolve/weaken superglue.