I had Jester help me come up with a suitably devestating list and I am now in the process of building it up so I can do some play testing with it. One unit that I was lacking was a Land Speeder. I was just getting ready to break down and buy one when I remembered a pair of fifteen year old Blood Angel Land Speeders out in my garage that Jester had brought over when he was proxying models back when he started his Blood Angels.
I figured that I could strip the paint off of them and paint them yellow so Jester and I worked out a deal and I got to work. I have used simple green in the past to strip paint but these models looked to be quite a challenge - they really are about fifteen years old and the paint looked like it was really thick so I wasn't to sure about how my results were gonna be.
I dumped the model in the simple green and left it over night. Over the next three or four days I would take it out at night and give it a good scrubbing with a toothbrush and put it back in.
As I worked on the model I ran into a few issues. For one a few pieces fell off - this was ok though as it just made it easier to scrub them. Something else that I figured out was that this model was painted in sections and then assembled. I could tell this by the fact that some places the paint would just NOT come off - this was around some of the joints. It looks like the glue flowed over the paint in a very thin layer and the simple green would not strip this off.
Above is the final results of my stripping efforts. It looks pretty rough in this state. You can see around the areas where it was joined together where the paint didn't strip off - this is where the glue dried over the paint. I was really worried at this point. I wasn't sure if this was going to work out at all.
And here she is with a brand new coat of yellow paint on her. As I started priming this model and then spraying it with the yellow spray paint all my worries went away. Even though the model looked really rough in its post-stripped state it actually turned out pretty nice after I got the yellow on it. I will say that I put the paint on a bit thick to help cover up the splotchy layer below and I lost a bit of detail, but overall I think it was the right thing to do.
I am going to call this effort a success. I am currently waiting on the yellow paint to completely dry - usually takes about a day but the cold damp weather is making it take a bit longer - and then I will finish paint this model up and let you all see how it turns out in the end.