updates and cleans some minis.
I thought I'd share an adventure I had while rebasing some Dwarves from my armies.
Way back in 2002, Rusty Hiser - who used to operate the 4Demons Painting Service - did a Workbench article on painting and basing a set of Dwarven Miners from the DemonWorld product line (no longer available).
There was only one problem. Rusty went ahead and based the figures using the unique plastic hexagonal stands from the DemonWorld game system, but not being familiar with the rules, he based them facing incorrectly. (In DemonWorld, troops face towards the point, not the flat side of the hexagon.)
Now that's a rather subtle error... but it bothered me, and every time I used those Dwarves in a game, I resolved to fix that problem someday...
Fast forward now a few years, and I've finally got those figures on my workbench. It turns out that extracting those Dwarves from the hexes is tricky! The figures are cast with round bases that sit into round holes in the plastic stands. I found myself almost destroying the stands to extract the figures from it - which was fine, since I had decided to use a different basing system that was more universal - but I was coming dangerous close to breaking the Dwarves off at the ankles!
Now I didn't know what glue Rusty had used (and couldn't reach him by email to find out), but I assumed it was superglue given how much trouble I was having removing the figures. So I came up with a plan...
I placed a stand of Dwarves in the freezer overnight, then in the morning, plunged them briefly into a pot of boiling water! As I suspected, the plastic bases curled from the heat, and the Dwarf models were easy to pluck out. (The glue, as it turned out, wasn't superglue - but whatever it was, the boiling water turned it into something looser and sticky.)
I checked the figures to see if they had survived the experience, and saw no broken parts, no cracked or discolored paint. So I repeated the experience with the entire force.
The Miners have been rebased individually on ½" by ½" steel bases - not the optimal basing solution, but a good method for someone like me who is always trying new rulesets with different basing requirements.
Curiously, I eventually noticed that a few of the Dwarves - three out of forty-or-so figures - had a negative reaction to the freeze/boil debasing technique:
They have sort of a "washed out" look to them. I'm not sure if a particular color leeched out, or if the clear finish became tarnished. (Or maybe they were always like that, and I never noticed?) Fortunately, they're still good enough to put on the tabletop!