The Saga of the Paint-effect Elves - Part II

In my first post on this subject, I smugly joked that now that I had found a paint that gave a convincing chrome effect, I should make sure I bought enough tins. Well, with predictable tempting of fate, I finally got round to buying some tins (18 months after writing that post) and discover that Dragon Colour chrome paint is no longer in production.

[Sigh]

So it's back to square one. Not quite square one actually, because in the meantime I've been building up a collection of high elf models from ebay and have amassed quite a collection, all waiting for their shiny new chrome job.

So what now? Well, I do another google search and discover another technology that I missed last time. There is now a chroming process that is applied like a paint, but is a chemical process (akin to the silver mirroring solutions used to create mirrors). The results are really impressive...

Furthermore, you can use the process on anything. You can buy the chemicals and do it at home, but you'd need a spraying setup like a car body shop, which I don't have.

You can purchase a non-spraying, bath type of rig where you pour the chemical over the object, but in either case the chemicals are really, really expensive.

And how they deal with detail is unclear - I haven't seen anything as detailed as a miniature silvered in this way.

So if I'm going to look into this further I'm going to have to ask a professional and get a quote from him. That involves approaching someone who sprays cars all day for a living. Like, a real man. I can't describe the sheer terror I feel for approaching a burly, tattooed gear-head and introducing him to my pathetic little hobby of collecting little stupid toy soldiers. Imagine his confused and disgusted face when I tell him what I do. Picture his contemptuous incomprehension when I show him a sprue with silly little toy soldiers on it. And not even actual military soldiers (he'd probably like that), but babyish Harry Potter rubbish. Imagine his bearly-contained anger when I correct him: "actually, they're elves, not goblins".

Email would normally be the perfect medium for this sort of enquiry - anonymous, distant, easily escapable. But real men who wear spray masks all day for a living don't really do emails, do they?

And I know what they'll say... £100 per sprue (or whatever). There's no way this is going to work out cheap. And therefore, there is no way this will work out.

[Sigh]