SMA What's New In Your Stash?!?

Hollow punches never work well for me — I usually find them too blunt to use on plastic card unless it's very thin, and they tend to leave much too ragged edges for the discs to be useful :(


Making discs to glue to models. It's not like I would use this all the time, but over the last few years I've often enough found myself needing to make discs of larger sizes than I can make with my modelling punch and die sets (one by RP Toolz that goes from 0.5 to 2.0 mm and one by Historex Agents that goes from 0.65 to 3.9 mm), that I was looking for something with bigger sizes of punch. For example, for this model I made the discs on the sides as well as the ventilator between the hatches using this tool:

full


To be honest, if I had found one half the size of this, I would have bought it instead — I can't see myself needing the larger sizes at all (though the commander's hatch on that same model is made from a 20 mm disc and an 18 mm disc I made with a circle template and a needle … I could now punch them instead if I wanted to make another :) ). There are sets with fewer punches on Amazon, but they were all either weird sizes (not-round numbers) or skipped too many to be useful (like having only 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14 and 16 mm), not to mention those were only around 10 euros less than this one that has both round numbers for the sizes and doesn't skip any.


Thanks for the compliment, but I wouldn't go that far :)
Like Andy I use the hollow ones all the way up to 20mm. I am intrigued on how practical they are in the sense of retrieving the disc from the holder. Is it easy to do? Also are the edges really sharp on the larger punches as you must need to use a lot of force to get a clean cut?? Also do you have the link from where you got these please??
 
Like Andy I use the hollow ones all the way up to 20mm. I am intrigued on how practical they are in the sense of retrieving the disc from the holder. Is it easy to do? Also are the edges really sharp on the larger punches as you must need to use a lot of force to get a clean cut?? Also do you have the link from where you got these please??
I use a set of leather punches for the thicker card, punching out onto a block of vulcanised rubber - but have to do it in daytime - the neighbour thought SWMBO and me were having 10 rounds untill I showed him...
 
Like Andy I use the hollow ones all the way up to 20mm.
I could never get those to work for me.

I am intrigued on how practical they are in the sense of retrieving the disc from the holder. Is it easy to do?
I've so far only used the 6 and 7 mm ones, and getting the discs out is not that easy. Each of the holes is bored all the way through the lower (and upper) parts to its actual diameter, they don't open up like modelling ones do. This meant that the discs "stick" toward the bottom, and to get them out required pushing with a tool that fits through, but not with the punch itself.

Also are the edges really sharp on the larger punches as you must need to use a lot of force to get a clean cut??
The edges are fairly sharp. It looks like the punches are simply sawn from a length of steel rod — you can see parallel lines on them at both ends — without any more work done on them.

Also do you have the link from where you got these please??
I searched on Amazon for disc cutter tool (after discovering that this is what they seem to be advertised as) and found two or three basic types being offered for varying prices by what seems to be different vendors, so I bought the cheapest one among them. The exact one I ordered is this but you may notice that the punches there are more elaborate than the ones I actually received. Also, I notice the price has gone up by about €10 in the week and a half since I ordered it …
 
These flew in today, I ordered them for the jeep and the staff car. I don't need the Mustangs, $40.00 shipped within the U.S. for the two planes less the cars and personnel. Private mail if interested.

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