Mr. Hobby products

A friend of mine in IPMS Seattle turned me on to Mr. Surfacer, from Mr. Hobby. Mr. Hobby is a Japanese company making some really good products targetted for modellers. Mr. Surfacer is like a very thick primer, or maybe a very thin filler putty - it goes on with a brush and fills holes, pits, joints, even ejector pin marks, and leaves a very smooth finish when dry and sanded. It comes in a few different flavors - 500 is very thick good for filling big gaps; 1000 is thinner and good for smaller gaps and surfaces, and 1200 (or is it 1500?) is like a brushable, self-levelling sandable scratch-filling primer. Good stuff, IMHO...

I also got some Mr. Masking Sol Neo, a masking medium also from Mr. Hobby. I've used Micro Mask along with soem other liquid masks, and they all seem to suffer from one of two problems - they're either a pain in the ass to lay down, or a pain in the ass to get back up. Mr. Masking Sol Neo is neither - it lays down very nice and smooth like a well mixed enamel paint without globbing or pulling. Once dry, you can roll the edge up with your fingertip (not fingernail, fingertip - light pressure and the edge comes right up), grab it with tweezers, and off it comes. My one complaint - the integrated brush in the bottle cap is way too big for any fine work, so I needed to know what dissolved this stuff so I could use a regular brush. A Japanese friend at work translated the back of the bottle for me:

How to use

• This product does not affect by the paint product
• Paint this product where you want to mask by using the brush which is
  attached in the cap of this product.
• The place you put this product will be dried in approximately 20-30 minutes.
  The surface will become semitransparent when dried.
• Remove the semitransparent portion after your painted portion is completely
  dried.

This product is water-soluble product. You can thin this product with water
as well as you can use water to clean up your brush.

According to him, the bottom portion of the bottle labelling is the safety warning, same as in the U.S. (don't eat, not for internal use, flush well with water and call a doctor if it gets in your eye, etc).

Good stuff from Mr. Hobby...