Bead Blasting - Fast Technique for Refinishing Old and Used Miniatures

[Flow]

My father has a rather "complete" garage, with all sorts of large gadgets. In a recent conversation with him, I'd talked about the time involved in restripping old miniatures so that they can be cleanly repainted. I love old Ral Partha and Grenadier miniatures with all of their AD&D cheese, but often these are only available in a used/degraded form.

So, the guy introduced me to a bead blaster. It's really just a small chamber that you can use a spray nozzle to jet stream tiny glass beads at a target and strip off any junk, as well as refinish its surface.

We tried it on a small broken orc I had as a test run, as I was afraid it might damage the mini - it didn't. In fact, it looked *excellent*. So I thought it would be fun to do some contrast/comparison photographs and show how darned well this thing works with cleaning up miniatures.

This green dragon is a set from Grenadier from 1986. It had obviously been painted and stripped and had a hazy black ick all over it, plus perhaps mild metal discoloration.

Closer picture - obviously it's pretty dirty and old:

Here's a picture after just blasting its hind quarters. Cleaning this up took literally 30 seconds or so. It's nearly *instant*.

Here is a photo I took of the entire green dragon set after bead blasting it all. I can see I did miss a couple of spots, but those can be zapped pretty easily next time I go out there and visit.

I felt the results were almost startlingly fantastic. The finish on the wings felt particularly incredible. They went from "crap" to having this silken perfect glow about them.

My camera is not the best for filming, but I went ahead and shot this little video of us bead blasting a 1982 Grenadier Balrog, just to show how fast it works:

I should have taken a better "before" picture with the Balrog, but he's obviously quite glowing in the "after":

I just had to share this as a refinishing technique for old miniatures. Being able to strip and refinish miniatures this quickly and finely is definitely pretty awesome. This was a "large" bead blaster and so probably wouldn't be easily acquired, but - from what I understand - smaller bead blasters are available and are somewhat in the realm of affordability, depending upon your personal level of insanity.

Also worth mentioning is that some experimentation should be done with the material used for blasting as well as air pressure involved. This was done with small glass beads; more caustic materials are available for bead blasters, but of course these might eat right into the miniature. This level of grit for glass beads seemed pretty ideal for this purpose.

 

[QuietiManes]

Cool, works faster than the time it takes to fill a jug and drop the minis into the stripper.

The surface looks rather textured in the pictures. If it's not just my laptop monitor being funky, you might want to look into getting a softer material for the blaster, like walnut shells. The glass might be digging into the soft metal.

You can get "air erasers" from a couple airbrush companies and counter top sand blasters from most hardware shops for a reasonable price, like you said. The compressor (with enough power to run them) can multiply the price a couple times though, so people should beware of that. Noting the air requirements.

 

[Flow]

The surface looks rather textured in the pictures. If it's not just my laptop monitor being funky, you might want to look into getting a softer material for the blaster, like walnut shells. The glass might be digging into the soft metal.

I think that might be the texture of the old miniatures. I checked out the back of the mage's cape, as well as the smooth portion under the base, and it appears to be very smooth. There may be an extremely fine grain; but I'm not sure if that will show up with paint, nor if it was even caused by the blasting. The bead blasting is a physical thing so it is certainly possible and something to consider and experiment with.

I did also bead blast an Otherworld Otyugh and this is a miniature that I'll probably be painting soon. We'll see how it turns out.

 

[Ordo Septenarius]

My word, Flow. You should find a way to make money on this; I could be your first customer (I have tons of minis that nothing is doing the trick on, especially when they're basecoated black!).

Very, very cool. You don't happen to be in the Portland, Oregon, area, do you?

 

[Flow]

My word, Flow. You should find a way to make money on this; I could be your first customer (I have tons of minis that nothing is doing the trick on, especially when they're basecoated black!).

Very, very cool. You don't happen to be in the Portland, Oregon, area, do you?

Not necessarily a bad idea, I admit.

As far as Portland goes, unfortunately, no - though we've fantasized about moving there. We're down in Los Angeles, south bay area.

 

[airhead]

try baking soda instead of beads. Local Harbor Freight sells a baking soda blaster and median. You could probably choke down the nozzle on the gun you're using and use soda fine.

 

[Flow]

I could also experiment with using lower air pressure; if the beads aren't hitting them as hard, I would think they'd be less inclined to do any damage.

I may do an experiment. I could take a new mini, take some close up photographs to show its grain, then paint it a base black. Then, bead blast it off and take another close up photo. The two 'before and after' shots should reveal if there's any scuffing going on.

 

[Trevor]

Wow, I need one of those...