I use copper wire from stripped power cables. Piano wire is overkill.
Sometimes 0.3 mm brass if I need greater strength.
Hit those plugged holes with liquid glue / solvent to kill those light coloured areas.
They may look smooth but once you get primer or paint on them they will show up like
beer rings on your table the morning after the night before.
Melt with liquid glue and fill with thin styrene, short pieces of very thin stretched sprue
will do the job, preferably sprues from the kit itself to get the exact same styrene mix.
Well my micro drills finally arrived so I could re-drill for the loops. I ended up using 0.45mm brass rod. I did think of using 0.3mm however it was very fragile and even looked underscale. I also bought a new drill vice as I imagined having knackered fingers after drilling so many holes. It went so smoothly using the Archimedes vice. The black areas around some of the drill points is from using blackened stretched sprue and not creating craters.
I am so glad I got that new drill vice. I have a habit of snapping my fine drills using my other one. You only have to place this and then use just enough effort to push the collar down the spiral and let the bit do the work. Very little actual force needed/used.
Max I have not seen that Pin vice before, sounds like a little gem, where did you source it from mate ? … its gold and shiny … lol Ryan @Tank_1812 will want it straight away haha…
I got it from Boyes which is a shop which does a bit of everything. Looking at their store finder it would seem it’s a Midlands and Northern thing. None in the south whatsoever. It was £3 which was worth it even if I use it only the once. One limiting factor is that the vice will only accept bits up to about 1mm thick, again not an issue as I mentioned that with the thin bits they snap under too much pressure from the people with Hulk hands and this doesn’t rely on pressure to work. If you want one let me know and I’ll fire it in the post for you.
This one is useful for the thinnest drills, the very light weight reduces the risk of the pin vise
breaking the drill just because the pin vise is too heavy
Thank you Robin! I should have thought of Micro-Mark straight away. They have almost everything tool-wise, although they take 30 days to pick an order!
Thanks guys. Just went on Amazon and dropped $10 for a nice one, will be here tomorrow morning. No waiting for Micro-Mark’s warehouse sloth to ship my order sometime around Saint Patrick’s Day…
I here yeah, I would done the same but waiting on my new card to arrive as it was hacked last weekend and someone wanted lots of apple apps apparently.
Oh Ryan that bites the big one! I feel your pain though, a few months ago I got caught in a website’s data breach and had ALL my cards compromised - I couldn’t order anything online for 4 weeks till I got all new cards - I went through serious withdrawals!
