Flames of War - U.S. Armored Division Part 7

Let's talk about objective markers in Flames of War and the dangers of buying from eBay here a little bit.

Clearly someone resin cast copied some pieces.

As you can see above I have 4 objective markers ready for painting.  Two of them are the destroyed Sherman marker that Battlefront put out years ago.  These are nice but I will be making some minor alterations to them here soon.  I already went all over them with a dremel and made more pronounced bullet and cannon shell sized damage to them.  I also changed the kill shot on one them to the front of the tank.  The other two objective markers I got from eBay and when I stripped them down they were horrible recast that someone had made and painted to pass them off as actual battlefront ones.  So I cut them off the bases they had and spruced them up a little bit.

The dangers of this are simple, but easily overlooked.  Without knowing the material that I am working with I can cause some real damage to myself or those around me.  When I strip models of paint I use some pretty nasty stuff from time to time.  Often I need to test the material to find something if its something I can safely work with.  When people are not clear on what they are selling an unsuspecting modeler can try to do something that either causes the model to become damaged or even toxic.

A few years ago I had purchased a small lot of models from several different individuals from eBay that were all painted.  With the recent purchase last year of an ultrasonic cleaner from Harbor Freight I have finally have been slowly working my way thru the mountain of old models that I had always wanted to fix up.

Most people do not know where to buy a cleaner or what kind to purchase(Click the link in the below caption for the Harbor Freight one).  Yes you can go nuts and get a top of the line cleaner for hundreds of bucks, but for what your gonna be doing this is the best bet option.

Here's the top reasons for using this one.

1. You can fit three Games-workshop Space Marine Rhinos in this thing all at once.
2. I have fit 40-50 Games-workshop Space Marine Terminators.
3. It has a heated function and timer controls for metal models.
4. Extremely user friendly and is super easy to remove models and clean afterwards.

Picture from the Harbor Freight website.

Below is a picture of a small batch of models that I have recently stripped.  Some of these models had varnish, acrylic paint, heavy automotive primer, and massive amounts of super glue type products.  All of it has been removed and with some minor scrubbing after a bath.

This is after a bath of plain water to remove any cleaners.