Happiness is the right tool!
One of the bugaboos that visits me when I’m building models is the need to fill gaps and scratches (scratches which I have inadvertently created!) and then file/sand the filler smooth. It rarely goes well.
The files I have been using are obviously too coarse for anything but imprecisely removing large quantities of plastic and filler. Smaller “finer-toothed” files haven’t helped much, and various grades of sandpaper literally don’t “cut it” fine enough or fast enough to do the jobs I need to get done. But perhaps I’ve found a solution.
Sunward Hobbies (Toronto) has recently offered this set of 10 files by Vallejo:
They are in different shapes, angled, thin, and sufficiently curved to enable them to reach virtually any hard-to-access section of almost any model I can imagine, except perhaps for extremely small scale models. I first used them to smooth filler that I had to use after repairing a horizontal stabilizer that I broke off my Academy 1/72 F-86F Sabre. I had used a small brass pin to stabilize the stabilizer, added thin crazy glue, filled the resulting gap with plastic filler, filed the filler smooth with three of the new files, and re-primed it. Looks good. Another few minutes with fine sandpaper should do the trick.
Here’s the link to the relevant Sunward Hobbies page:
Bob
On the bench: A diorama to illustrate the crash of a Beech T-34B Mentor which I survived in 1962 (I'm using Minicraft's 1/48 model of the Mentor), and a Pegasus model of the submarine Nautilus of 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas fame.