Baking this stuff

[cbovill]

Having been deeply impressed with the quality of work on this site, I have decided to revamp my ship painting process. I have never baked MicroArmour or MicroNauts in an oven before, but I understand it is supposed to make the paint job stick to the model very well.

Have any of you done this with Micronauts before? and if so, at what temp do you cook them and for how long? I am very concerned about melting down my ships just as they are nearing completion - they are simply too expensive in money and my creative effort to risk losing.

Thanks,
Chris

[groundlber]

Wave off! -Wave Off!! - WAVE OFF ! !!
Chris - Now that I have your attention, I want to discourage you from attempting to bake your micronauts or micro armor. Most oven's controls s aren't accurate enough to reliably note the internal temperature, and the temperature will be different at differnt parts of the oven. I tried this a couple of times with larger scale figures, and none of the attempts were successful. Utter disaster would be a more accurate description. I had thought by setting the temperature bairly above the boiling point of water that everything would be fine.
I'll let the physics majors give the scientific explanation, but the small pieces make excellent heat sinks, and skinny parts like masts and barrels had a bad habit of twisting or melting outright. If you absolutely want to bake on a finish, use a hand held hair dryer at low setting and well away from the work.
Maybe other people have had success with this technique, but I'm not taking another chance.
Groundlber

[Tony Aguilar]

I tried with a copule of ships such as HMS Rodney arond 1992 and found out that it definitely alters the painting color a slight bit. I had no adverse effects other than that, but I wont be doing it anymore (and haven't done it since then). I find that priming, painting, sealing, and then basing gives a more durable result.

[Jmrino]

I too had experimented with baking micronauts. I set the oven on approx. 150 and left them in 25-30 min. on a clean pizza stone. I cannot tell if the baking improves the durability anymore than just the normal priming, painting, sealing, but it did have the added effect of leveling out some slightly bowed hulls that I couldn't otherwise get 'just right'.

I currently omit the baking since after finishing them up and basing they don't tend to get treated like Matchbox cars - unless my 2yo gets hold of them that is.

[cbovill]

Well that settles it for me, I'm not going to bake these ships - sounds too risky. Thanks for the input!

[pmskaar]

I have been baking my tanks and ships for years in a conventional oven. I do it at 200 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes. I use a piece of drilled out wood to set the pieces on putting up to 8 pieces mounted on nails for painting on the wood. I have never had any problem with melting or paint distortion. I use Humbrol enamels and Floquil Primer. I usually bake the pieces several times during the painting process. No problems for me.

Pete - Binpicker, Out!