John Vojtech, the genius behind UMM-USA, gave us a nice collection of tools at the Chattanooga National Convention this year. I have the privilege of reviewing a handful of them and here’s #1.

If you’ve never used a UMM product (and why not?), they are exquisitely manufactured. This particular tool is an extremely narrow (0.8mm/0.031 inch) chisel mounted in a sturdy, contoured plastic handle. The blade tip is a grooved, wedge shape.

What’s it good for? Removing minute amounts of material in a controlled fashion – ejector pins, molded on detail that’s to be replaced, flash removal, scribing detail into small parts, etc. I have been attempting to do this with an X-Acto knife all along, now that I have this tool I can actually maneuver the cutting surface into the immediate area rather than trying to cut at multiple angles and clean up the resulting carnage <g>.

The short summary – if you’re not using a tool like this (or one of its’ many cousins, UMM provides them in multiple sizes) you’re doing yourself a disservice. Check out the UMM-USA website for many other one-of-a kind products, some of which we’ll be reviewing here.

Thanks to John V and the UMM crew for the ongoing, generous support to IPMS/USA.