I dont know if its old hat or not. I guess I hope someone says gee, I can use that.
I use one of those circle cutters you can get in the scrapbooking section to cut about inch, maybe 1 1/4" dia disks out of 1000 grit and put them on the dremel with the extension. Very handy for gently sanding off small marks, smoothing out filler, etc. The disks dont last very long, but its certainly faster than by hand. And they’re floppy enough that at slow speed its awful hard to gouge something or make any kind of serious mistake.
I made the mistake once of trying it with 600. Little too agressive.
Gee, I can use that.
Thanks for the idea - I’ll certainly try it on a test subject first, but anything that saves time and doesn’t harm the model is certainly worth trying!
A Caution to all when using the motor tool for sanding or polishing:
I had a polishing wheel chucked in the Dremel tonight, and was happily buffing away on a clear windscreen that I had hand-sanded some imperfections out of.
Well things were going so well at a slow speed, that I decided to hurry it up and get done faster (and maybe achieve a better polish) by putting it on high speed.
Here comes the snafu, folks… the high speed on the Dremel spun the polishing disk TOO fast, which resulted in a melted gouge on my canopy before I could pull it away. I never thought the soft polisher would do that, but I learned my lesson now… had to start over with the coarse sanding sticks. Same advice goes for sanding… at too high of a speed, the motor tool will messily melt your plastic instead of sanding it.
Haste makes waste!
Andy
aye, always go slow. It’s amazing what a little friction will do to plastic. I learned that lesson while thinning the wings on my Bf109D so the resin wheel wells would fit. Fortunately it was in the inside, and I noticed it as soon as it started… the plastic got gooey fast! A minute or two with a sanding still was all that was needed to “fix” the problem. whew! [%-)]