About Tools

 

 

Most of the projects described in this part of the website are fairly easy to accomplish with a minimum of skills and time invested. The greatest difficulty for most folks will quite possibly be the acquisition of tools. To that end, we offer these remarks:

 

PAINTS AND FINISHING MATERIALS:

Spray paint is your friend. One can still find it for about $2-2.50 per can, but one can spend more for the more durable or fancy finishes. One can each of gray primer, black, white, violet, orange, green, yellow, red, blue and maybe indigo and/or silver will be about all that will be needed. Use enamels if you are painting plastic and always prime first. A can of lacquer (like varathane or polyurethane) is also a must.

Artist's paints are required--we recommend a simple set of acrylics that hold all the same colors as mentioned in the paragraph above dealing with spray paint. A range of 3-4 brushes running from 1" to very tiny should be all you need.

Sandpaper can be obtained in an inexpensive variety pack with grades from 60 to 220 (the higher the number, the finer the grit).

 

SUBSTANCES:

Leather thong and gold wire.

Sculpey, or a similar hardening modeling compound.

Sheetstock: could be metal, could be plastic or a fine grade of wood. Metal is probably the best for our purposes, but note that one needs some special tools to work it.

2-part epoxy is indispensible. Duro-bond and JB Weld are readily available everywhere, not too toxic to the nose and they dry slowly enough that they can be worked with easily.

Clear wax (available usually in the canning section of your local grocery) sometimes called "parowax".

Various woods in scrap-sizes.

 

HAND TOOLS:

A coping saw will be needed, probably including an extra blade.

A metal file is quite useful, particularly of the sort that has four different faces combined into a single tool. Avoid shure-form type rasps for this sort of work.

Tin snips (they come right- or left-handed, note!) for working sheet metal.

Misc: Tape, stapler, pins, pencil, straightedge, compass, magnifying glass and SAFETY GLASSES.

 

POWER TOOLS:

Computer w/scanner and color printer. This can solve a whole lot of your artwork problems. Cheating? We don't think so. It took about 6 hours on several consecutive days to come up with the design for the disk--it would have been faster by hand, perhaps.

Drill.

Sabresaw (the hand-type jigsaw).

Sewing machine and related items.

Dremel Moto-tool or similar, along with a few of its basic bits.

 

As usual with all tools, more is better...