Sandpaper or sanding sticks?

Tools, Techniques, and Reference Materials Tools
1

Been Modelling for over 35 years now. Always used wet or dry sand paper for sanding, filing and polishing.

Is there any advantage to using sanding sticks? Never used them yet…[:|]

thanks

2

Depends. In some cases they give you more control than trying to drape paper around a finger and get it to the right place.

I’ve found I prefer sanding sticks for:

  • Fuselage seams and other high-point seams - the relative rigidity of sticks makes it a lot easier to hit just the seam and not the surrounding detail

  • Those annoying “on-seam” sprue gates more and more manufacturers are using nowadays (Trumpeter, Tamiya’s 1/32 kits, HK, etc). The sit on the seam, which preserves surface detail, but makes eradicating them a pain. Again, the rigidity of the stick is excellent for knocking them down.

  • Tri-grit sticks for removing centerline seams on canopies

For big surface jobs, polishing, etc, I prefer paper or, even better, micromesh polishing cloths.

1 Like
3

Agree with Doogs… he hit the nail on the head with his reply.

I also use steel wool…

4

I used needle files for those chores…maybe Ill try the sticks! [;)]

5

I like sticks formost jobs where they can fit

6

It’s a money vs convenience thing. The sanding sticks make a few processes easier, but you can always glue strips of sandpaper on sticks yourself. Cheaper, but a little more work.

For smoothing seams, like someone else posted, I swear by needle files or scraping. You can scrape a seam by holding a #11 blade (in a knife handle) perpendicular to the surface and drawing it along the seam. It dulls the edge rapidly, so I keep a seperate knife just for seam scraping. When I replace a blade in my primary knife the old blade goes into the “scraping” handle, replacing the old blade in that.

7

Yes Don, Ive used that one too![Y]

8

Yes…and steel-wool has been a staple of mine for several years as well…

9

Sticks allow for better control…IMHO…

steel wool…well that I usually use when theres too much rust…

10

i love these things. micromesh sponge sandwich. can be cut up into small shapes if needed to get into small(ish) spaces.


IMG_0405 by omgpainful, on Flickr

11

Do you know those greeting card holders that often come with delivered flower arrangements? (They’re usually made of clear plastic and look like overly-long forks.) I cut those to pieces about three or four inches long (an old pair of garden shears works for this; don’t forget your eye protection), cut a piece of Testor sanding film to fit, then super glue a piece of the film to a piece of the greeting-card holder. Each of my homemade sanding sticks gets a different grade of the sandpaper, of course. I like to color-code them to match the colors of the sandpaper grades, but that’s not absolutely necessary.

Here’s another homemade sanding stick: Years ago, I needed to sand out a difficult-to-reach flaw in a tight area and my solution was to:

  1. Cut pieces of 1/16-inch styrene rod about an inch or so long.

  2. Punch out pieces of the aforementioned Testor sanding film to fit with a Micro-Mark punch set. Place a disk of sanding film shiny-side up on a piece of wax paper.

  3. Carefully dip one end of a styrene rod into a droplet of super glue and remove excess glue by touching it to a napkin.

  4. Carefully touch the sticky end of the styrene rod to the disk of sanding film. (Later, I went on to color-code these too, but again it’s not mandatory.)

Recently I made a larger version of these out of 1/8-inch styrene rod cut about 2 1/2 inches long.

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squadron sanding sticks for even though they aren’t cheap. flex a file also.

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I use needle files for most of my sanding. Large areas I use sanding films and 320-400 grain sandpaper.

14

Check around for fingernail sanding sticks. Same thing as squadron sticks but cheaper.

Flex-i-file is great for curved surfaces like a fuselage or edges of wings. Kinda pricy though as the sanding strips clog fast and cost about $3 for a small pack.