So I had not planned to do another lead rot post until next week, when my pure gum Turps and highly refined mineral oil shows up. A couple of things prompted an earlier update.
For one, I had posted about this on the Lead Adventure Forum, and gotten some great feedback. One of those suggestions was using baking soda to neutralize the reaction – oddly enough, my Mom suggested this to me as well after reading my posts on lead rot and asking what it was.
I’ve already committed to using the other method, since I bought the stuff and all. But I may go ahead and do some work with baking soda in the meantime, because…
…the vinegar really seemed to make things worse. Makes sense, fighting acid with more acid, but that seems to be the conventional wisdom floating ’round the ‘net. Inspecting my figures again today, they definitely seem worse that before I started this process. A fe pix, followed by more bloviating:
There is more whitish oxidation on this dude, seemingly than yesterday. The pock mark on the cheek above his mouth is more pronounced. Not good.
I think this an an old Heritage dude, either from their Galactica or Star Trek ranges. I did not take a close up of him before the vinegar soak-n-scrub, but i am pretty sure he did not have this amount of oxidation.
Right now, I put the figs back in distilled water to soak for a bit, in case any more vinegar is lingering. Then tonight or tomorrow, I might try some baking soda action on one or more. based on what I read, the turps/mineral oil is stronger, but this might halt any damage I started with the vinegar.
So I got that going for me.
One thing I’ll be doing from here on out is at least priming all my old figs, as that prevents lead rot from starting. Here is a batch of clerics, wizards, and bards I primed while messing with the rotting figs.
Here are some recent re-cast Ral Partha Chaos archers being Primed:
Finally, here is my favorite primer. Coats the whole figure, but goes on thin, leaving all the detail.
It doesn’t seem to work well on plastics, as the Reaper Bones figs I primed with it remained tacky.
I’ll probably do a post tomorrow with the visual results of the baking soda treatment. Until then…
Excelsior!
I know the post is about older figures, but nowadays, are the “pewter” metal figures lead-free? Did they stop lead a long time ago? Just curious.
Also, recently I purchased several of the steel figures through HeroForge. I LOVE the figures, except that they’re more like 35mm than 28mm. Any comments on that?
Hey, George,
Almost all figures today are lead-free. There was actually some litigation on this decades ago, I remember reading about it in Dragon Magazine at the time. The guy who was doing figure reviews in the magazine tried to get readers to contact their representatives to fight the impending lawsuits and changes to the law. I should go back and read some of that stuff!
In order to avoid getting sued by State or the federal governments, all manufacturers voluntarily witched to a lead-free medium. Pretty much any figure from the early 90’s until now is fine. There are a few exceptions, but those are mostly boutique manufacturers and a few foreign companies.
Not that familiar with newer companies. Is HeroForge one where they do a custom mini for you? 35mm is crazy big. 30-32mm seems standard these days from GW and Reaper. Even most 28mm are too big to scale with my guys!