I have a number of unbuilt 1/350 resin kits waiting in my stash but I am put off by the amound of work to remove the overpour found on the bottoms to make them flat at the waterline (not to mention the arthritis that makes this a very painful process to do by hand). I have several kits that need extensive sanding to remove major hunks of resin as well as the usual overpour. I was hoping that someone here had experience with the disk sanders that Micro Tools sells and could steer me in the right direction to help with the removal process. I also have some large scale plastic kits that one of these tools might be helpful with. They sell one with a very low spin speed for the disk and another smaller one that rotates at a much higher speed. I realize that the very high speed one would be a problem for injection molded plastic but I don’t know about the resin. I have seen a suggestion for a belt sander but I can’t imagine how you would keep the hull secure without damaging it. Perhaps I overrate my ability to do so with the disk sander as well. Any ideas?
Let me suggest that you look at a 4" belt sander at Sears or you local big-box tool emporium.
I have a small disc sander, similar to the ones sold at Micro Tools. It is good for squaring plexiglas blocks for scratchbuilding, but I have not found it too useful in removing pour stubs from the bottoms of 1:350 hulls. Its a size thing. You need to hold the ship square up on its side against the rotating disc. If you are going to rest it on the table - you still need to account for the flare or tumblehome. Then there is the size of the hull. Even the smallest 1:350 scale patrol boats are longer than 4-inches. Add to that, on a 4-inch disc you have 2 inches going up and 2 inches going down. (Perhaps whole hull 1:700 ship may have some applicability).
With a belt sander you can place the sander upside down, belt up (mine fits well in the vice on the workbench). I can then hold the ship easier with its bottom on the belt. Pass the hull back and forth along the platen on the bottom of the belt. A coarse belt (belt grits are interchangeable, another plus) removes the material quickly, while a finer belt can be used for finer material removal. Yet another plus - you get the full width of the belt to work with
I have used my belt sander to remove pour plugs and lower hulls on resin kits. I have also used it to waterline a styrene ship.
As always when sanding resin, use the power sander in a well ventilated area and use some sort of particulate mask. When I remove a hull bottom with the sander in the garage - it looks like a snow storm has hit with all the fine white powder.
Your other possibility for a waterline kit, at least from the Iron Shipwright line of kits, would be to order a short pour directly from Ted Paris. Ted will custom short-pour a kit on request. I think it actually ends up a little cheaper (material cost).
Ed, I read your post and have looked at a bunch of belt sanders on-line. I don’t see how you can turn them upside down and clamp them to your bench. They don’t have even or symetrical tops! I have seen several bench type sanders combined with disk sanders, do you think that will work better? With some exceptions they all seem to be at least a couple of hundred dollars. Are these the ones you meant?
My Sears Craftsman 4-inch belt sander is probably about 20 years old. The top of the motor housing is flat and the sides are for the most part parallel. I am able to stand it on its top for light/quick work. I have a bench vise which opens wide emoug to accept the top of the sander to clamp it for heavy/prolonged work.
If I was in the market for a new sander I would definately look at a dedicated benchtop belt/disc sander. While not the quality of a name brand bench sander, there are some sold via Harbor Freight Tools for less than 100 bucks. Check you local tool traders. If you are using the tool irregularly and not for professional use, it should stand up to normal hobbiest use. I have one of their drill presses which has given me no problems.
Dreadnaught52, I used to work at HD. Take a look at the Ryobi DETAIL sanders there in the tool dept. Should suit your needs perfectly. Also if you can find help get a selection of grits for the little triangular shaped pads. The thought of using a 4" belt sander on a 1/350 model makes me shudder. Way too much overkill. Like using a D-9 catto rototill your flowerbed. By the same token it’ll be easier to handel than the Dremel for such things since there’s no spinning disc to jump when it catches.
Here’s another approach for removing the overpour on the bottoms of waterline resin hulls.
First, fit a fairly large diameter ball (at least ¼ inch) tool to your Dremel or other motor tool. Drill a bunch of depressions in the hull bottom well away from the sides. If the ball tool will tolerate it (mine will, since I have diamond tools), keep the bottom of the hull and the ball wet to hold down the resin dust. The wetter, the better: lots of water keeps both the resin and your diamond tool cool.
If you have arthritis issues which make the wielding of your Dremel tool somewhat unreliable, you can use a pin vise with the biggest drill bit that’ll fit to make starter holes before you flail away with your Dremel.
By the time you’re done, you should have about 3/16th of an inch around the edge with anything inside of this looking like a scale model of Iwo Jima after the bombardment.
Then, take a big piece of 150-220 grit wet-or-dry sandpaper, put it on a flat surface, thoroughly sop it, and sand away. It goes much faster when you’re only dealing with the outside 3/16th + 3/16th of an inch rather than the full beam of the hull.
If by detail sanders you mean ones like the “mouse”, I have tried them. It takes way too long to sand down the quantity of resin on a 1/350 hull overpour or short pour to get a waterline. The vibration over that long sends me to the medicine cabinet for days with the pain from the arthritis in my wrists and hands. I appreciate the thought and I have used this type sander for minor overpour removal. Some of the resin ship kits have huge clumps of overpour on the hull pieces and some (like the old Blue Water Navy kits have NONE).
I have used methods similar to this in the past but I am unable to do this kind of thing any more. That much vibration and I’ll be dropping more parts than a Hollywood producer can drop names.
Thanks Ed, I will be checking out tools tomorrow for an inexpensive combination sander. As you suggest if I am using it for hobby purposes and not for heavy use I should be OK with one of the less expensive models. The less time I spend with the vibration and pressure the better. I have been amazed at how much overpour some kits have. Even a short pour from ISW still needs to have quite a bit removed. I guess being a waterline guy has its price.
Dreadnaught 52, You might try tying down your Dremel in a horizontal position and use the ball cutter the other gentleman suggested. Then you move your workpeice against the spinning cutter. That way you dont have the vibrating handpeice in your hand. There are various ways of holding down the Dremel but make sure its high enough from the workbench to get full access to the bit. There is a drillpress like attachment available for the Dremel that will allow you to use it this way. Its called tha Dremel workstation and is available thru Micro-mark.
I suspect the sanders in the Micromark catalog would do the job more than adequately, but they strike me as being a little expensive for what a modeler is likely to want from them.
I’ve got a Dremel combination disk/belt sander that I bought about thirty years ago. It’s a basically sound machine; it still runs fine, despite the considerable workout I’ve given it. I think it cost about $80 when it was new; the modern Dremel equivalents are quite a bit more expensive. For my purposes the tool has two weaknesses (both fairly minor): the belt is inconveniently narrow (2", I think), and the original table next to the sanding disk was pretty crude. I replaced it with a simple wood one, which I mounted permanently at 90 degrees to the face of the disk. (The original table was adjustable, but the mounting mechanism on it was sloppy.)
I also have a Skil belt sander - the cheapest one I could find at Home Depot. (I don’t remember what it cost, but I think it was around $35.00.) I’ve never used it so flatten a big chunk of resin, but it looks like it would work for that purpose. The handle of it is molded in such a way that I think it could be clamped pretty sturdily in a vise.
I’ve been thinking about buying a new bench sander to replace the Dremel one. Delta offers a couple that look like they’d be much nicer for modelers - at reasonable prices. The one that particularly attracts me has a 3" (or maybe it’s 4") belt that can be pivoted from vertical to horizontal, and locked in either position; the disk is, I think, 5" in diameter. It seems like a wide belt like that, mounted horizontally, would be pretty good for sanding the bottoms of resin hulls. The price, at Lowe’s, is right around $100.00. Not bad - and, if I’m not mistaken, quite a bit cheaper than Dremel. I’ve bought several other Delta benchtop power tools over the years, and haven’t had a bad experience with any of them.
The Micromark sander that’s really catching my attention at the moment is the newly-announced thickness sander. Several such machines, specifically designed for ship modelers, have been on the market for quite a few years, but all of them have had pretty steep price tags. This one costs $200.00. On the basis of the photos it looks like a well-built machine; my biggest reservation concerns its capacity. It only handles stock up to 5" wide.
I sympathize completely with the arthritis situation. Mine takes the form of nasty cramps that jam up my fingers without warning - the sort of thing I didn’t think about twenty or even ten years ago, but can really turn a modeling session from relaxation to frustration. The good news is that, by picking tools carefully (e.g., an oversized handle for an X-acto knife) and making some minor adjustments in techniques (e.g., using tweezers in some situations where fingers used to do fine), most of the problems can be overcome. I also think (or at least I’m trying hard to convince myself) that the more time I spend in the workshop, the less frequent the arthritis flareups are.
Good luck.
The little belt-sander in MicroMark’s ‘Microlux’ range (No. 15229) is a versatile little tool and easy to clamp in a table-top vice due to it’s square shape. The coarse belts do remove material very quickly and it’s own bench-top holder accessory is also useful when you want two hands to control small jobs. It’s also German-made (by Boehler), quite powerful and very rugged.
I find a small drawback is that the belt ends are joined at right-angles rather than diagonally and you can get a regular ‘bump’ as you work. It would be handy if you could make your own belts to order as well, rather than rely on only the three grits available. These are ideal for wood-working but a couple of finer grits would be handy to me.
It’s cheaper in Australia in it’s Boehler Minitools guise, but in both cases buying the OEM power controller makes it pricy. I run mine off a 13.8V 2amp CB power supply, but you can use almost any 9-18V source provided it can handle at least 1-2 amps - an SLA 12V battery is a good portable source.
Michael
Thanks everyone for your suggestions. I took the plunge today and went to Sears to see what I could find. They had a combination disk/belt sander on sale for $99 so I bought it. It seems like it will do the job I need it to do. The instructions are pretty awful but I plan on being as careful as possible as I don’t care to ruin an expensive resin hull!
Professor, I recollect reading somewhere that regular exercise benefits joints affected by arthritis.
Way back when, I used to be able to play the piano. The mass of the action balanced on each key runs 12-16 ounces. About a decade ago, I had to give it up because setting that mass in motion really got the old joints snarling at me. I’ve since discovered the delights of the clavichord. While it’s a much more difficult instrument to play well, the action (such as it is) masses less than an ounce per key. Plus, with the clavichord literature, you’re usually only pressing one key per hand at a time, not several.
When I’ve been away from the instrument, it takes several weeks of practice to get back up to speed. I notice that my joints really bark at me for the first few days. But then it hurts less and less as the days go by.
Dreadnaught, having never built a resin kit I apparently missed the mark on what it was you wanted to do. The Sears sander is a good choice. I would advise you to play with the tool for a little bit with scrap blocks of wood etc.before putting that spendy resin hull to the test. Also figure out a way to hook up your shop vac,so you won’t be ingesting resin particles. Those sanders work fast and they generate dust acccordingly.
J.Tilley, I ordered one of those thickness sanders from Micro-Mark despite my trepidations over the future availability of the sanding sleeves and its probable country of manufacture. There are several of those rigs out there but they started at $200 without a motor. I was on the verge of building a wooden one before the MM one came along. If one is so inclined the plans for thickness sanders come out in the wood working magazines from time to time. I will offer a users report when the thing arrives,it was shipped monday.
i’ve got the plans out of a wood working magazine for a thinkness sander.
Reklein - I’ll be most interested to hear what you think of the new Micro-Mark thickness sander. I’ve seen several articles about how to build one; in fact a member of our ship model club did it, with considerable success. The problem is that any such design has to start with a relatively large, perfectly cylindrical piece of wood (or metal) with a shaft perfectly centered in it. My dear little 30-year-old Unimat lathe isn’t capable of turning anything that big. I’ve kept a lookout for such a thing in the various catalogs that fill my mailbox every month, but so far the Micro-Mark one is the only one I’ve seen that combines acceptable specs with an acceptable price. (A couple of woodworking machine manufacturers make bigger drum thickness sanders, but they start at about $500.) If this one turns out to be any good, Micro-Mark may have a big seller.