Without wishing to sound obtuse, I have the whole set and I love them. I have actually ordered some refills of ones i have used up.
I think it depends on how you do your streaking and rust effects. I think if you are someone who uses washes instead of enamel “spots” then they might be a bit limited for you. I prefer using enamel spots and streaking with enamel thinner and for this, the pencils are great.
Key is, I’ve found anyway, is:
A) you do have to press quite hard to get anything appreciable to go down and care must be taken as, as others have said, they are frangible.
B) wet the area you want the streaking effect on with odourless thinner first. They don’t go down as well on a dry, unprepared surface.
C) exception to this is using the lighter coloured ones for quite nice chipping effects in certain instances. I cant remember where I saw it but there was a guy on one of the forums I saw who reckons he has changed his whole chipping process from sponge for the lighter first step to just using the lighter coloured AK pencils and then brush chipping the dark second stage over the top by hand. Evidently he found it greatly beneficial and I tried it on my latest model recently and - to be fair - it does work nicely. Especially for running along sections of exposed straight edges etc. No need to thin first or after, they go down just fine on their own. I dig it. I cant see myself replacing sponge first stage but it for sure does have its time and place.
I use them mainly for rust and grime/rain streaks as they are a little more precise than the streaking brushes I was using before. I quite the combo actually - Mig Streaking brush rust for the streak as it is a nice deep orange colour and then over the wet area adding the red rust streak over the top as it is darker and makes the effect more two dimensional. It works nicely.
I also like using them for running over the exposed areas of rubber and running gear as it is like a more precise drybrushing effect, and the ability to use greys and even blues etc really add to the creativity.
If I had a complaint about them it is that they are too frangible for a product that requires you to press quite hard to get the best out of them but I wonder if we might see a second generation of them using pen bodies instead of wood, with a nib designed to help stop the breakage by supporting the torquing load of you pressing down better than the wood does.
I also think they are very overpriced for what they are but that’s a modeler thing not limited to these pencils or indeed just to AK. It feels sometimes like normal tools and paints, glues, handy bits and pieces, varnishes, mats, etc you name it, tend to triple in price as soon as you slap “MODELLER” on the packaging. I love Tamiya but they are outrageous for this.
Anyway I digress.
Bottom line is it depends what you use them for and how you fit them into your work process. For me I really like them and they do have a place for me as they fit nicely into how I weather models. I fully get why others wouldn’t see a need for them or have space for them into their processes. They don’t do anything we couldn’t do before, they aren’t revolutionary as such, they are just handy and helpful and push creativity a little more vs paints in my view. Whether that is worth the high cost of buying a set is up to the individual - its horses for courses as they say.
I think if you are wavering about whether to buy them, buy the Dust, Rust, the light grey and the Buff coloured ones first as these are the ones that usually get used the most. See if they work for you. If they don’t, then you’ve only lost ten bucks and not the six or seventy odd for the full set.
