My son is 9 years old and plays a modified version of the game. He was gifted a number of battletech minis, most have numbers on underside of base and are easily indentifiable, but we have a few, here are 3, that we require some community assistance with as there are no numbers. I did my best to get good photos, the blue and black primed ones were a bit hard to photograph.
Any tips on stripping it so we can repaint? It’s metal. Most of the ones he received were unpainted, but a few, mostly metal ones were pre-painted or primed.
A good soak in Simple Green has always worked for me. Soak it for a day or so, then take a toothbrush to it under running water. Sometimes it takes a couple rounds depending on the paint. Other people have their own preferred medium but that's worked for me for like 25 years in various minis games.
Being metal, acetone is a pretty common solution. Cheap and readily available. I do a lot of refurbishing of models of all types, so I use LA’s Totally Awesome cleaner, but it may be more difficult to find depending on where you’re located
Very important caveat - acetone is metal-only. Do not use it to strip plastic because acetone will melt the plastic mini. Best solution for metal, but for plastic, use LA's totally awesome or simple green
Acetone or high percent isopropyl alcohol. Degreasing cleaners like Simple Green will also work but with metal you can use rougher stuff to yank off stuborn paint
I hate stripping plastic. It's near impossible to get a good primer off and takes too much effort to get paint out of the grooves. I know how much easier they are to work with, but I'll take metal over plastic every day.
In addition to the other suggestions, that all work, a cheap solution is LAs Totally Awesome. Available at Dollar Tree in Canada or Dollar General in US.
You have a Spider, Shadow Hawk and a Panther.
The spider is the original version. The Shadow Hawk is the project phoenix redesign. Not sure about the Panther.
The underside photos show the first two are mounted on official hex bases. To see the model information for the actual sculpts you will need to separate the models from the bases. This can be done by soaking the miniatures in acetone, which will dissolve the glue.
If you do decide to dissolve the glue in acetone, know that the Project Phoenix Shadowhawk is a fscking b!tch to (re)assemble. The Spider should be fairly straight forward.
The Panther is plastic and will absolutely dissolve in acetone. Just use a degreaser, like Simple Green, too remove the paint.
2nd mech is the SHD-5D. The project phoenix shadow hawk has a super distinctive reflective "cobra commander" helmet. The multibarrel RAC and the 4-tube launcher in the head narrow it down pretty fast from there
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u/AGBell64 14h ago edited 14h ago
Spider, Shadow Hawk (specifically a Davion Project Phoenix one), Panther