If you don’t count my one long fingernail, mine would have to be a ring cutter that my brother gave me from the medical company he works for. It’s supposed to be used for cutting jewelry from swollen fingers but it works great for styrene and balsa strips too.
-fish
An electric toothbrush. One of those $5.00 Crest electric tooth brushes with some 600 sanding paper superglued to the brush. A wonderful and inexpensive power sander.
Swanny that is brilliant! [8D] I like to use drafting pens as liquid cement applicators. [;)]
Swanny, that is a great idea! Gonna have to try that one…
It’s not really wierd, but I use disposable wooden chopsticks (don’t tell GreenPeace!)all the time, for all kindsa jobs. Stirring paint, mounting pices for painting, aligning link trax, bases for sanding blocks…and others I can’t think of right now. A versatile piece of wood it is!
And just to make it better, you can buy additional replacement heads for the brush and apply different grades of sandpaper to them so it becomes a multi-tool. Very useful for sanding wing roots and intakes.
Swanny, you beat me to it (kinda). I use a Lady Remington Smooth & Shapely Manicure System in the same way. It oscillates in-line with the body, runs on 1 AA battery and has 5 attachments. I use rubber cement to attach the sandpaper.
And my nails look GREAT! [:X] [:D]
If you think about it, to someone who doesn’t model a lot of us (myself included) use a really weird tool when we airbrush - panty hose - great for straining paint - Besides which, I tend to agree with Murphys 9th Rule of Combat:
If it’s stupid but works, then it ain’t stupid
the bristle head of an old toothbrush is useful for cleaning parts before painting or getting rid of dirt in displays, much like a miniature shoe buffer! just break of the handle after a little deration at the base, and it can still be used as a putty or glue applicator! transparent colored toothbrushes also make good signal lights, depending on the specs and size you can carve easily.
used toothpicks (eeooohhh) for paint mixing are the most unusual, but cheapest!
I CAN’T BELIEVE FSM DIDN’T FEATURE THE TOOTHBRUSH/POWER SANDER THING EARLIER! That’s a stroke of genius! Man, i gotta find one of those things for myself. The weirdest thing on my desk are straws. keeps my brushes from being flattened, and it’s a good way to transfer paint to a palette, or even thinner.
oh, and which grade of sandpaper best gets rid of plaque? and maybe we’ll see a whole new line of dental products from this like: Stretched Sprue Floss (comes in desert yellow and neutral gray) [:p]
While we are on tooth care, I use a Water PIK to wash models before I paint them. It quickly removes sanding grit, loose putty, etc from panel lines, door seams, and other hard to reach places.
I work in a research laboratory (see alias) and there a lot of specialized tools that I have adapted from the lab to the modeling bench. I used Parafilm long before it became available outside the lab. Weighing spoons, tiny spatulas, and other lab tools make great applicators for putty, epoxy, and various glues. My rule of thumb is that almost any strange lab implement has some sort of modeling use.
We have a vacuum coater for our electron microscope that deposits a gold coating on samples. Sometimes I will stick a small detail part in with the samples and have a perfect gold coating.
I don’t know if these qualify as weird tools, but one thing I love about the hobby is scrounging around, finding outside-the-box uses for new tools, and even building my own tools when necessary. If only the quality of my models reflected this effort…
ChemMan, I’m with you!! There’s all sorts of stuff to use in modelling that can be found at the sewing shop, the medical supply house and the auto body supplier, just to name a few.
You know the mini-drill that comes with the Star Trek optical fibre kits? I’ve converted mine into a motorized paint stirrer. I just wish i could figure out how to make a chuck for it so I can use different size drill bits. Any suggestions out there?
Rich
Those are some great suggestions guys, especially the one Swanny posted that seemed to go over well. [8D]
I guess modellers are the real mechanical engineers in this world. [:D][;)]
Mike
Went to a friend’s house one day and say a beaut of an F-14 on his bench. Looking closely I saw two stings hanging out the rear. When I asked him what it was he promptly grabed the stings and popped out two tampak and say “just the masks, I was painting today” Ribs hurt for a week from the laughter.
Moist toweletts for wiping down a model to remove sanding dust. I also use them to clean out paint bottles after use. I also have a camera lens cleaner with brush that works great for blowing off dust and cleaning hard to reach places. A mini dust buster for cleaning up around my model desk and finding small parts dropped on the carpet. With the fine mesh paper filter, I have recovered many parts off of the carpet that I thought was lost forever.
A coffee cup warmer to keep the white glue/water decal solution warm and to warm paints before spaying.
While over at the Scale Auto Forum quite a few people have used Food Dehydraters for helping dry paints quicker…I bought Diane a new larger one 2 years ago…and have had her old one sitting in the garage collecting dust waiting for that yard sale I swear Im going to have one day…anywho…I havent tried this yet but I plan on blowing the dust off of the old one and plugging it in tomorrow!
I’ve used nylon stockings as a filter with my dust buster. I got the idea when the wife bought a box of foot stockings instead of knee highs and asked me if I could use them for anything in my modeling. She’s great about finding stuff for me to use. I thought about it then got the idea to just insert in over the opening, place the excess inside and use for removing excess “grass” & “dirt” form dioramas. The stocking provides a handy pouch to keep the material clean and together to re-use.
i use ear-diggers to hold CA. now that is freakay
Nothing much weird stuff in my tool-box, msot of it came from the local LHS.
Including this gadget that sends the family fleeing for the bathroom whenever I pull it out.
Great for adding damge, heating “water” in diorama to add waves, etc and similar things.
deci damps ear plugs are great for “masking” hollow odd shape areas. These are earplugs that machine operators use that you roll/sweeze into a point and they expand until they hit a solid joint and gives a really close mask ( I have never had to do any touchups around these masks. Square, rectangular, circular, oval, any shape they will cover.