Hi all!

So with 8th edition of 40k right around the corner I recently dusted off my boxes of Imperial Guard (sorry, Astra Militarum) and Black Templars, pulling out both masses of unbuilt sprues/boxes as well as all the assembled stuff in its foam. I took a few days to decide which I would be doing, but I decided I like the Primaris models coming out a lot, so I went with the Templars to run them with.  About 60 of my old models had paint on them in some way shape or form, some barely touched, others ‘finished.’ However most of the finished models were ones I bought from a friend for cheap back in the day when he was getting rid of them, so I wanted to go ahead and start this all from scratch, including the ones I had done myself.  I went and pulled up a nice little FAQ on Dakka about stripping paint, grabbed some supplies, and got to work.

First I went and popped the ones that were on bases off, as I will be doing the bases separately once I start the painting process. I did this whole thing with a small set of 5 models first, just to make sure the cleaning agent (Castrol’s SuperClean) wouldn’t deform the plastic in any way. Better safe than sorry. Once I’d seen it work on the first 5 however, I went and dunked the rest.

About 11 hours later after an overnight soaking, I went and pulled them out and started scrubbing. They looked awful right out of the bath, with the paint all deformed, but it came off easily using a new toothbrush. The primer fought, and a lot of it is still on the models, however any layers of paint above the primer was easily removed. After a nice little rinse to remove any excess cleaning agent, all of them are currently drying.

While waiting on that, I went through and started doing inventory on the rest. A few Predators, Rhinos, Land Raider Crusaders, land speeders and various Dreadnoughts round out the force. The infantry of course includes a mixture of tactical/crusader marines, assault marines, and Terminators (my personal favorite, using Thunder Hammers, Forge World’s BT Storm Shields, and then Grey Knight terminator heads because they’re just plain cooler)

I haven’t been this excited about 40k in a few years. Very much looking forward to the official release, I’ll be posting a few more articles about this army as I work my way through it! What are you guys working on?