Can they be saved? Rescuing minis.
At our local games club, we've recently been playing medieval games, namely Lion Rampant and Barons' War. I have been going through my collection of 12th-century miniatures, collating and dusting off what I have. These include a mix of old Foundry, Crusader and Footsore in metal, and Fireforge. We plan to run a campaign for Barons' War set locally in Devon. To encourage more participation in the campaign, I have been giving potential players miniatures to help start their own factions.
About two and a half years ago, I grabbed a bargain off the bring-and-buy at Attack 2022. There was a box of unloved Fireforge models; they had been assembled but only spray-painted. The total number of figures amounted to three or four boxes, and they were going very cheap. I found out when I took them home why they were so cheap!
The miniatures were mostly fine, but several had been assembled poorly, with heads at odd angles or arms not quite fitting the arm joints correctly. To add insult to injury, they had been sprayed with a thick black undercoat, which drowned the detail in places.
The better half of the miniatures went to a friend for a Lion Rampant army. My costs were covered. He still got a bargain, and I was not out of pocket. The rest of the horde sat in a box until very recently.
Readers may recall that I recently posted a blog about some hybrids of Fireforge and Atlantic that I made. These conversions made me think; I had plenty of additional arms and heads from the recent releases from the new Atlantic plastic Baron's War sets. Maybe, I could go through these models and convert them into something worthwhile. Could they be saved with a little makeover and a few extra parts?
To be fair to the original owner, I have picked some of the worst examples to photograph. Other models simply didn't have the right weapons; the Fireforge lances are very long and tend to look ungainly unless they are modelled correctly, close to the body. The flail and dane-axe sized battleaxe used from horseback are just too ahistorical. They just had to go! The lance pose makes it look like the model is about to tip out of his saddle.
The first task was to strip off the weapon arms. Riders were removed from their horses if they weren't straight. Thankfully, they were assembled with superglue and were relatively easy to separate from the body. Some parts just fell off!
I was tempted to use some form of paint stripper to remove the black, but decided not to, as I know some react badly to plastic. Once the arms and head had been cleared off, I simply added new bits from the spares box. Easy!
One torso and legs set wasn't salvageable, so I cut it in half, threw away the damaged torso and used a spare one from the Serjeants set. I have saved several of the models from conversion, awaiting the arrival of the Atlantic Mounted Knights and Mounted Serjeants sets to see what other conversions I can do.
I'm pretty pleased with the finished models. The new parts have given life to otherwise unwanted miniatures. I will try further experiments, including head swaps on metal miniatures. Now for some painting...
Have you repainted and rescued unloved miniatures? Please do tell me of your experiences.
6 comments
When I am confronted with 2nd hand miniatures, which I buy quite freely. My go to stripper for any and all is Dettol in a sealed tub. This removes enamels and acrylic very happily. Resin miniatures need a bit more TLC as in not leaving them over night but a few hours and scrub carefully with an old toothbrush, then back in if not cleaned off. Metal minis I leave for a couple of days. Old paint is very stubborn especialy enamel, so some patience may be required.
Nice, good that they were only glued with superglue! I had the same thing with a load of Perry mounted knights, they’ve come up alright and I think you’re right not to have tried stripping them!
Best Iain
Hi, i am slow collecting a BW force. I am about half way, just need to get some foot troops with swords… mace… and such. No bowmen required, as i already have some.
I have a new business where I clean substrates using lasers. What happens is that the contaminant on top of the substrate, in this case spray paint, would be ionized into a plasma, and the shock waves would literally take all the paint off the surface. This works great on metal, Stone, concrete. I’m hesitant to use the laser on plastic, but I think it would work fine on the metal miniatures I may try to do it on older plastic miniatures that I don’t care about. At full power The laser is delivering almost 11 million joules of energy. 😳 The energy drops off exponentially with lower wattages. So if I go down to 25% it might be only in the hundreds of thousands of joules of energy. This might be enough to clean off plastic or resin without melting the entire figure. You have to be careful though. There are a lot of settings on these types of machines. I tried cleaning old pennies using it. I didn’t realize I was slightly out of focus the first few tries and it just wasn’t taking anything off which was surprising. I kept increasing the power. Finally I realized I wasn’t at the correct distance and readjusted the bracket. I forgot to turn down the power. If you’re interested in any US coinage without faces, I’m the guy to talk to! Lesson learned. I think for resin and plastic miniatures you want to use something like Pine-sol.
I love bring back old minis. You can only do so much, the sculpt, materials and casting have improved since the 70’s but the early stuff takes me back to when I started.
A worthwile endeavour indeed. I only recently rescued some A&A miniatures 3rd century Romans. By head and weapon swapping with Victrix Late Romans, as well as adding some other bits and pieces here and there, I was able to bring them to a more modern standard.