To dremel or not to dremel?

i find new uses everytime i dig it out. the other day i modded a smooth strip to polish wax. freakin' genius, that one. like to meet the guy.

i think you could make/mod one yourself.

Now that's a good one...wonder if the waxed side might be good for polising the seam out of a canopy. I've used jeweler's rouge for that before - the flexi might be just the ticket. Again.

Yeah - I'd think any A/C rheostat would do the job.

sure, just glue the polishing surface to a worn sanding strip. worked fine for me. should be much faster, too. great isea, rufue, i will try that too.

i bet you could even wind one yourself.

TKM makes cars, sorta. Don't EVER start building cars with one of those! Over on the HH board there's an ongoing story of the struggle of one woman (yes, woman) to turn one of those into a decent replica of a '68 Mercury Park Lane convertible. If she's successful she's having it copied in resin for sale. I wouldn't worry about trademark infringements there. Nothing about the finished product will reflect the original except the name. I still have a '53 Dodge Coronet to fiddle with. If the '49 wagon is any measure I should have the '53 done about 2019.

Bill Banaszak, MFE

My experience is that the Dremel (I use the Mini-Mite) is of little value if you are building a high quality kit more-or-less out of the box. It is mildly useful for resolving difficult corner seams in an older long-run injection kit, though hand sanding follow-up is still necessary. Where the Dremel really comes into its own is when working with resin aftermarket, with vacuforms, with all-resin kits, with conversions or cross-kits, and with some of the limited-run injection kits. For example, MPM's IAR-80 is a pretty good kit, but there are more than a dozen really large ejector pins strewn around the inside of the wings and fuselage. Most of them interfere with mating the pieces properly, so they have to come off. You can get rid of them all with a Dremel in less than five minutes, and it's one of the rare cases where no finish sanding is needed. Doing the same work by hand would take a lot longer,which would inevitably come out of modeling time that would be more fun spent elsewhere in the process.

I'm presently working on the Minicraft (read Airfix 1964) Boeing 314 Clipper--it's just about ready for SNJ. My total Dremel time on this kit is about 30 seconds, and I could have spent five minutes hand sanding instead. If this was the level of utilization I expected out of a power tool, even one as cheap as a Mini-Mite, I wouldn't buy it. Most of the stuff I build is a lot more complex, though, and the Mini-Mite has proved its value with those models.

Mark Schynert

What livery are you doing your 314 in? The Pan Am with the orange wings? Was it, in fact, natural metal? I had read somewhere that it was painted silver/aluminum...

Oh by-the-way....I grabbed my kit at Hobby Lobby recently. On their mark-down table, they had two boxes of 4-plane-set "Classic Prop Airliners" (Boeing 314, Connstellation, Stratocruiser, DC-3), (mis)marked for $10.04. Naturally, I grabbed both sets....

:o)