Experimenting with new Strippers...uummm...Paint strippers that is!

As I have mentioned in the past I have been using Simple Green HD for the past couple of years to strip paint from minis that I buy on line for my collection or for resale.  This product does an adequate job though I found that I needed to soak figures for up to a week before I was able to easily remove most of the paint...and even then I often followed the Simple Green soak with a quick dip in Acetone to remove paint from the hard to clean areas.

So when I started to hear about a product called Dawn Power Dissolver, and how great it was for stripping old paint, I decided to hunt some down and give it a try.  Sadly it is apparently already OOP...sigh.  Luckily I was able to find a few bottles from an online seller who still had stock...so I ordered 4 bottles and decided to run some tests.  Below are the results.

For this test I decided to use a group of 10 Marauder and Citadel dwarfs that I won from an ebay auction as my test subjects.  Now... I was out of Simple Green HD so decided to compare the Power Dissolver against the much more prevalent "regular" Simple Green.

Here are our test subjects...5 dwarfs for each stripper....

...man that sounds terrible! 

...anyway...the pics

These are going into Simple Green

These are going into Dawn Power Dissolver

My plan was to put them into their respective stripping agent...remove one of each after 1 hour and examine results....then remove another after 24 hrs and assess the difference....and then another every 24 hrs after that until there was a clear winner.  To that end into the bath they went!

As I'm sure you guessed: Simple Green on the right, Dawn Dissolver on the left

So as planned I removed the first two dwarves after an hour and this is what they looked like.

 

You can see that the power dissolver really clings to the figure on the left...and the paint already looks "loose" and it was!  Here is what they both looked like after a bit of a scrub with a paint brush.

Insane!  the figure that was in the Dissolver is nearly clean after only 1 hour in the stripper! The one that was in simple green still has a lllllooonnnnggg way to go to reach the same level.

I nearly stopped the experiment right there...but decided to proceed and see how things looked after a day....but I already knew that a new champion in town!

Here is where the remainder of the figures looked after 24 hrs in the two baths...and a little scrubbing with a tooth brush

Power Dissolver victims on top...Simple Green on the bottom

As you can see the difference is quite stark....the ones that were in the Dawn product are perfectly clean and shiny...not so much with the Simple Green test victims...though it did better than it usually does after this short of a test period in my experience.

A close up to show just how clean the top row is!

At this point I saw no reason to continue with my test....the winner was clear...Dawn Power Dissolver is my new go to paint stripper!  I will be trying to track down a larger supply to stock pile.

I was so happy with the results that I went ahead a stripped a huge vat of figures that I had piled up...all of these were cleaned after just 6 hours in the soak!

I should mention that since this test I have learned that there is no need to soak the items in this product...I've had great success with just spraying it on and letting it sit for a few hours...this will greatly extend the life span of the limited supply that I have because it uses so little of the product

I should also mention that it does not loosen superglue bonds...Acetone is still needed for that operation....it can't do everything...but paint removal it does VERY well!

Cheers for now!

Blue