Gamers: Use Cyber Clean to clean your miniatures!
About a month or so back, I was nosing around the electronics area of the book store and came across this display for a product called “Cyber Clean“, complete with a really annoying video that repeated itself over and over again.
My first thought was that the stuff looked exactly like the slime that kids have hours of fun with (you know, like The Masters of the Universe Slime Pit, The Harry Potter Slime Chamber, Jabba Glob, Real Ghostbusters Ecto-Plazm, and Gak).
A packet of it was pretty cheap, and I figured that if it gave a grown man a chance to play with slime – what the hell? I bought one.
Once I got it home, I put it in “The Chamber of Secrets” (aka my wife’s nickname for the little area we keep all of the cleaning products and pet supplies) and sort of forgot about it until yesterday, when I thought I would give it a shot cleaning off the laptops, my keyboard, and the assorted remotes.
Seriously… this stuff is awesome.
It is marketed as:
…the only cleaning compound that can reach inside all of those difficult to reach places and remove all those nasty and harmful things while cleaning on contact. All you have to do is press and pull. No rubbing required! Cyber Clean® will leave all the surfaces clean and fresh smelling!
… and you know what? It lives up to every single expectation I had. My nasty Xbox 360 controller (you know how game controllers get in the grooves – filled with dead skin and dirt from you hands) came out looking (and smelling) like new, as did the keyboards, computer mouse, and remote controls.
But this isn’t a house-cleaning site. Here’s where it will really come in handy for gamers:
On a whim, I decided to see what it would do to some of the dusty miniatures that I had standing out. Every gamer has them – from minis that you don’t have room for in a transport case or box – to those that you have standing out as references or display pieces.
I’ve tried a lot of different things to keep my minis clean, but dust will get back on them sooner than later, and it can really dull the nice paint jobs. For this test, I tried out Cyber Clean on:
- Unpainted plastic
- Painted plastic
- Painted / varnished plastic
- Unpainted metal
- Painted metal
- Painted / varnished metal
On every single type of miniature I used Cyber Clean on, it removed all of the dust (and it even takes of finger grease / bug excrement / pet dander) without doing one bit of damage to the miniatures themselves. The compound itself is so malleable that you can flatten it, put the mini inside, ball up the Cyber Clean around it, open it up – and the figure is clean. No residue, no problems.
I even applied it to a few types of flocking materials (sand and grass) on miniature bases and had no problems whatsoever with any of the flock coming off.
At about $5 US for a 2.65 oz. packet, it will allegedly give you about 50 heavy repeated uses – so in essence you could clean thousands and thousands of miniatures if you wanted to. So for miniature gamers, a mere $5 investment for something this useful seems to be a naturally smart decision.
Go try it out!
