I was priming the DA Providence a while back, admiring the nice details on the armor, when I had an epiphany: All these new high-detail, yet relatively affordable kits come from China. The local hobby scene must be booming over there, so there must be a demand for similarly affordable quality tools. Since the Chinese way of doing things is to manufacture stuff themselves to keep costs down, such tools must exist! But if they did exist, why haven't we seen or heard about them before? I'll tell you why - because they're only sold in the Chinese domestic market, and everything is written in Chinese!
Driven by a wild theory and armed with nothing but Google Translate to aid me in my quest, I set forth to find these mythical tools. I spent hours deciphering cryptic Chinese shopping websites, finding myself in one dead end after another until I was close to giving up - but I finally found them - and what I discovered could open up some great possibilities for the local hobby community. Of course, finding them would be the easy part - I still had to confirm that these tools were real myself before peddling them to you, my beloved readers. So what does your friendly neighborhood otaku do? Take a risk, put some hard earned cash on the line, and place an order - ignoring all warning signs that this was a bad idea. Well it turned out to be a damn good idea after all, as about three weeks later a small package arrived, the awesome contents of which I will be showing you in the next couple of posts. Let's kick things of with these nice Xiang Model files! Click on the Read More link for the rest of this post...
Modeling files are as essential to the custom builder as a hobby knife. They are meant to do the brunt of the work when trying to smooth down a surface, and come in many shapes and sizes for different applications. The one that sees the most action is the flat file. For the longest time I've been using cheap hardware store files - and while they did a passable job, I often had to polish up parts with sandpaper because they didn't leave a smooth finish. These Xiang (at least that's how I think it reads) Model files are high quality box files that produce excellent results, and will be a dependable ally in my mecha modeling adventures to come.
The pair of files come in a pleather protective sheath and have grippy foam-filled rubber handles that are comfortable to hold and make it easy to keep them straight while working. From what I could translate, the file with the blue handle claims to have fine 1000 grit teeth, while one with a black handle has a coarser 800 grit.
Compared to my old flat file (with the red handle), the machining on these are superb, and the thickness means they will stay straight and flat as the day they came out of the factory.
Testing them out, the black file shaves off a good amount of plastic with each stroke, leaving a clean flat finish on the surface of the plastic. When treated to the blue file, the surface is left completely smooth, and you could probably skip the traditional sanding step and go straight to primer!
Cleaning is made easy with the steel and soft bristle brushes that came with the set that I ordered. The steel bristles take off most of the debris that gets trapped between the teeth, and the soft brush sweeps it clean and leaves it looking good as new.
Here's a quick video showing the files in action...
If you're in the Philippines and are interested in getting this quality file set, drop me a line on the facebook page (facebook.com/budgetotaku) and I can discuss the details.
I've got a couple more things to show you that are sure to shake things up in the local hobby scene, so stay tuned! Until next time, keep building plamo!
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