Dismantled and Stripped

While I might have bought one of Bachman's new Skarloey models I knew it was going to stay as a cartoon character for long and here we have the proof.

Yep the model has been completely dismantled and stripped of it's paint, at least as much as I can without damaging the plastic parts. I use neat Detol as a paint stripper as it's safe enough to use in my study and is cheap and easy to buy. Leaving the cast parts to soak for an hour or so and the paint just falls off. Unfortunately stripping the paint off the plastic parts is much harder. If you leave the plastic parts to soak too long not only does it soften the paint but it softens the plastic as well. My approach to this is to soak the parts for about ten minutes and then gently rub off the softened paint with a cotton bud, and then repeat the process until most of the paint has been removed. I then use a fibreglass pen to remove some of the more stubborn paint before using T-Cut to ensure the plastic surface is still nice and smooth. As you can see this gets rid of most of the paint although leaves traces in some hard to reach spots. Once I figure out exactly how I want the reassembled model to look I'll probably have to cut into some of the plastic parts which might make it easier to remove a bit more paint, but we'll have to see how that goes.

You might notice that I haven't stripped the paint off the cylinders. This wasn't an oversight, I know I'm going to replace these so it didn't seem worth the effort to remove the paint given that they are pastic parts.