Debasing Mage Knight

I've got a pile of old Mage Knight figures, and there's really not a whole lot you can do with them. No stores will touch them, nobody will buy them, the bases are too large to play nice with other figures, and a lot of the sculpts and paint-jobs are decidedly mediocre. After pledging to the Reaper Bones Kickstarter*, I thought maybe I'd use them to practice my (non-existant) painting skills until May when the bones ship.

An outline of the process I'm looking at:

1. Remove the figures from their bases.
2. Remove the paint from the figures.
3. Attach the figures to new bases.
4. Paint the figures.

In this post, I am just considering the first step: removing the figures from their bases.

From this . . .

. . . to this.

This process is about as simple as it seems, the figures pry off of their bases fairly easily with a craft knife. I recommend practising on some figures you don't care about first, such as these "Feral Bloodsuckers" (I chose the same ones because I plan to test solvents on them, so they should all be similar).

There are a few tips I can offer however:

• Freezing the minis does help them come off easier (unless they're wet from washing, then the ice just mucks things up).
• Wear gloves. You will cut yourself. You'll cut away from your hands, you'll keep the mini in a clamp, you'll think "I'm smarter than that", and then you'll go and cut up a finger.
• The motion isn't really a "cutting" motion so much as a "prying" motion. Which isn't to say that you should pry the figure off with the craft knife, but that the gap is already there and you just need to widen it.

Join me at an indeterminate point in the future, when I test an array of household (and exotic) solvents and cleaners on these.

* - Incidentally, if you missed out on the kickstarter, it looks like you can still get in here.