So I know that there's been discussion about how best to strip the minis. And write ups have been done for both the MF and the A wing. But I couldn't find anything for an actual X wing, which seemed to me to be a different base plastic.

But thanks to Target's $12 core sets, I had an extra X wing that I could experiment on. I chose the poorest painted (and slightly distorted) X wing I had, and proceeded to attempt to strip it. I first put it in a bath of Simple Green. After about an hour, the wash had been stripped. But that's all that Simple Green did. I left it in for another 48 hours or so without any signs of progress. Even after scrubbing at it. But there was no damage to the mini.

^{Mini status after 48 hours in Simple Green. Notice the wash is gone.}

So I decided to try brake fluid next. I didn't have the courage to put it in a bath, but it turns out that with just a bit of scrubbing, the paint came off just fine! And it didn't seem to damage the mini at all.

^{Mini after 20 minutes of light scrubbing with brake fluid.}

I'm not too sure I'm happy with the end result - I might end up restripping and repainting it all, but here is the end result. I chose to paint the base color Reefer White, which is what ILM used for their models. It looks a little weird standing next to the beige X wings that I haven't repainted yet though.

^{End result. At least until I decide that to repaint it again.}

have you tried Dettol? It's the pine oil that's the active ingredient so any pine oil based product should be good to go, the higher content the better. Simply pour it into a container and leave the miniature to soak overnight. I use this to strip, metals, plastics, anything really and it will get rid of oil, acrylic, emulsion based paints very effectively. I would recommend scrubbing with a little white spirit and a tooth brush when your done and using a tooth pick to clear out the recesses. Its a very effective method, 90% of my 40k grey knight army was second hand and some were painted so you couldn't even see detail on the bodies!

Dettol isn't as nasty as brake fluid by far either

I usually just Dry brush the Reb ships, to give them that "Dirty" cause were rebels look. I also hit the engine's cause they don't look right out of the box. Plus I hit the inside of the engine with some paint to give then that "fire-up" engine look.

I haven't tried Dettol. I tried what I had available, it seems to work. I stripped another one today skipping over the Simple Green. It took more work with the break fluid, but still not too bad. Here's Corran Horn's. I'm much happier with how this one turned out. But once again, the pictures are so zoomed in that it looks sloppy in the picture, but great from a foot away.

As someone who has stripped and repainted a solid 4-5 40k armies, I really dont see a point with x-wing. The paint on them is super thin. I think it would be easy enough to just add some 'warpaint', various striping and what not, while keeping the very good existing detailed work. I look forward to adding new decorations to my ships, repainting the engines and such, I am not willing to do.

I started my experiment with applying really small amounts of thinner with an old toothbrush to my x-wing: BAD idea, since it started to eat away the details. So in the end I just cleaned it, primed it and repainted it (also as Rogue 9) the Y-wing I just left as he was and painted the golden markings red and applied some ink afterwards.

Sorry for the overexposed pictures.

As someone who has stripped and repainted a solid 4-5 40k armies, I really dont see a point with x-wing. The paint on them is super thin. I think it would be easy enough to just add some 'warpaint', various striping and what not, while keeping the very good existing detailed work. I look forward to adding new decorations to my ships, repainting the engines and such, I am not willing to do.

I also wondered about the need. What is the compelling argument to strip these ships before repainting? I have done some customs in other games, and this concept is new to me. Is it a carryover from games where players get unpainted models they have to paint, and is this the basis for a preference to strip back to a "blank canvas"?

I'd appreciate some feedback from those more experienced.

My thought was that I was changing the base color from beige to white. I was unsure of how well the white would cover everything (especially the over painted engines) without going on too thick and hiding detail. Interestingly, there's quite a bit of detail I never noticed on the ships until I stripped them.

My FLGS has one of the reprint core sets, and FFG apparently found a new way to paint the X-wings that reveals a lot more of the detail on the model. The original releases had thicker paint that hid some of it.

As someone who has stripped and repainted a solid 4-5 40k armies, I really dont see a point with x-wing. The paint on them is super thin. I think it would be easy enough to just add some 'warpaint', various striping and what not, while keeping the very good existing detailed work. I look forward to adding new decorations to my ships, repainting the engines and such, I am not willing to do.

I also wondered about the need. What is the compelling argument to strip these ships before repainting? I have done some customs in other games, and this concept is new to me. Is it a carryover from games where players get unpainted models they have to paint, and is this the basis for a preference to strip back to a "blank canvas"?

I'd appreciate some feedback from those more experienced.

As a plastic modeler, I can say that the main reason you'd want to do this is twofold.

First, the paints you're using may not be 100% compatible with the base coat used on the prepainted minis. I've seen some pretty bad reactions, usually stemming from somebody using lacquer on an acrylic base, or something like that. Stripping it eliminates this risk because primer gives you a base upon which to paint that most paints love.

Second, paint is not completely opaque, unless you're dealing with an extremely dark color. Yellow is notoriously bad at picking up the tone of whatever color is below it. If you strip and then prime it, you'll have a sold base which produces consistent colors throughout. This is pretty important for ships like the A-wing where a large portion is one color.

One other reason which is something that has nothing to do with paint is that if you use decals, it is often advisable to apply them on a solid color rather than multiple colors, because of color bleed-through. This is especially true with home-made decals. I plan on painting mine, but I would think someone would come out with a set of Red Squadron Death Star Attack decals eventually. They'd be a heck of a lot sharper than painting by hand.