Tamiya Handy Drill
With my Angels of Absolution tournament build well under way and some nice sore fingers after drilling the holes in the feet of just one of the tactical squads to pin them to their bases, I decided there must be a better way.
I had seen the Tamiya Handy Drill mentioned before and thought I’d give it a whirl. I placed my order and eagerly awaited its delivery while I left all of my drill intensive tasks until last. A few days later the post man dropped the drill off along with the Tamiya Fine Drill bit set. Here are my impressions of the tool:
Unboxing
I admit that I had to chuckle when I first opened the box for this thing. I am used to buying tools for working on my cars, tools for working on my house, and tools for working on my hobby. I opened the box expecting to find a tool that I could immediately pop a drill bit into and go to town. Unfortunately there was some fine print I didn’t read somewhere…. This is a tool kit. When I removed the lid I saw that all the parts to the drill were on sprues or in little baggies.
Yay More Assembly!
For someone who likes building models the least (and enjoys painting them the most) you can imagine my elation when I realized I had to build the tool that I had to use to build my models 
Assembly
Not realizing this was a kit was totally my fault so I really can’t fault the drill for this aspect. As it turns out the kit was really easy to assemble and the parts were attached to the sprues in such a way that they didn’t really need any clean up (the part I hate most about plastic model assembly). All in all the kit went together really quickly and the instructions were pretty clear. I was up and running in less than thirty minutes.
Functionality
Let me say that my thumbs are thanking me for picking this little guy up. I tried using a dremel before and while I love the tool for larger projects, it just seems to spin too fast for modeling projects even at its lowest settings. This Tamiya drill is spot on. The fact that it only rotates while the trigger is pushed also helps as you can “pulse” the drill as needed. Using this drill I was able to rip through three tactical squads and one terminator squad worth of feet for pinning in about 15 minutes and with no sore fingers!
The Final Product
The only thing I’m working through is that the smaller of the two chucks provided with the kit is not small enough to hold the super small bits (like the Tamiya Fine Bit set). It worked fine for my general “pinning” bit, but seems to be too large for the bits I use to drill out gun barrels and the like.
My plan is to wrap the ends of the smaller bits in painters tape to give them a larger diameter that the chuck can hold on to. If anyone has any better suggestions on what I can do I’d love to hear them.
Conclusion
I’m a huge fan of this little drill. It was money well spent and has already saved me a bunch of time and sore fingers. I highly recommend it, just remember that you can’t use it out of the box.
Now that assembly of all of my infantry is complete, I’m moving on to the mech so I better go back to my “dungeon of army assembly” and continue inhaling shaved plastic and glue fumes…
