Saturday 2 March 2013

Gameswork Shop Tools a personal view

How many GW hobby tools do you own? Here there are five.

This is a brief opinion based review of their usefulness here.

OK. The five are from top left to bottom right, to spell out the contents of the picture, the vice, the saw, the green stuff modelling tool, the clippers and the spray gun.

Scoring them out of five with five being the best and one the worst, the tool that scores five is the saw.

The saw is the best value and most useful tool that GW sells in the opinion here. Why? Because the blade is thin, the teeth are ultra sharp, cutting metal easily, there are few if any alternative products that are easily accessible, the height of the blade helps make straight cuts, the handle gives an excellent grip and all in all when working with metal minis only a dremel is more useful.

In second place is the vice. If something needs to be sawed off then the mini needs to be held stationary and the model vice does exactly that despite being simple in design and operation.

In third place is the green stuff modelling tool. If you don't convert and use green stuff then it is of little use. The cutting end of the tool is also of little use but the manipulation and smoothing end is excellent for controlling and sculpting green stuff. Just keep it clean and moist when using green stuff.

In fourth place are the clippers. They are useful tools but there are many other ways of clipping parts off sprues. Where the clippers come into their own is when converting plastics, their design makes it relatively easy to safely cut through quite thick plastic components avoiding injury to the hobbyist. There are scars here to affirm this assertion.

In fifth place and only of value due to its low price is the spray gun. It is usable. Mainly as a one shot use. After the first use it is almost impossible to clean the gun the to again give as good a result as the first time. In addition the cans of propellant only work well at ambient - room temperature - so the spray system does not work outside well except in the summer. If you cannot afford to spray paint inside it will not work well at all. But on a positive note it can be considered as an economic one use disposable spray system particularly when compared with the cost of buying a proper spray painting system with compressor etc.

Which GW tools do you have and which are the best in your opinion?

1 comment:

Will said...

I do not own any GW tools, but from everything else I've heard It looks like those are accurate ratings. The spray gun looks terrible. I may someday pick up that saw when mine goes dull- it looks nice!