Stripperiffic

This is more or less a product review. Hope it's helpful (I've not been paid for this in any way. If anyone wants to, though, feel free)

Stripping minis has always been a chore. My own personal favourite was always the old nail polish remover but the shift to plastics out paid to that as the acetone free stuff was never as good. 

Since then I've mainly been using brake fluid which, although brilliant, is seriously nasty stuff. Then a read a forum post about this stuff: 

Biostrip 20 is available more or less everywhere online and I got this pot for a tenner. It's like slightly watery PVA and this single pot will do for an awful lot of minis as you will shortly see. 

So, how do you use it? Well, you pretty much just dip the miniature in. For my first test I used the Orc Bloodbowl team and a lovely Saruman which I picked up at a car boot sale slathered in paint. 

So, we dip the minis:

And leave them for an hour. 

Within a few minutes you can already see the pigment starting to come off in some of the colours:

And within half an hour the paint itself is starting to crackle and blister:

After an hour a quick rinse and scrub with a toothbrush shows that this stuff is dynamite:

Only a couple of very thick dollops in deep recesses remain, such as on the Black Orc:

But these can be scraped off with a fingernail. The stuff is non toxic and doesn't smell of anything much, so I had no worries scraping away at it. Overall, the team looks more or less like new. 

The only problem I ran into was with Sir Christopher Lee; it turns out there was another coat of paint under the first - and this one appears to be enamels. 

Another dip and another hour and most of the second layer disappears.

So, the bottom line: this is exactly the product I've been waiting for. It makes stripping paint a minor job rather than a major chore, something you can set away while you're painting something else. 

As you're simply dipping the miniatures in fairly thick liquid, this one pot would easily be enough to conveniently strip a normally painted warhammer/40k/saga/lion rampant sized force with a fair bit left over. And for a tenner, that's hard to beat.