[1:02] Welcome to Wargaming Recon. I am your host, Jonathan J. Reinhart. I am so excited to welcome you back to a new episode of the podcast. It is 2025, everybody. Here we are, you, me, our friends, and everybody else here for another calendar year of the podcast. I know we've been away for a while, and we'll talk about that a little bit later in the episode, but I want to dive right in to today's topic. We're going to be talking about some hobby tools that you can get from Foxbite Hobbies. So Foxbite is a small business and they make paintbrushes and painting handles. They had sent us some paintbrushes to review and I had also previously purchased a painting handle that I wanted to go ahead and use.
[1:59] And I just want to let you know all of that. We like to share when we get items for reviews or if there's sponsorships or anything like that kind of stuff. But as you know, if you've been a long time listener, right, that doesn't impact our review, doesn't sway our opinion, but we just like to be open and transparent about these things. So today we're going to be talking about this and we're starting off actually with their painting handle. Now, I know, I know, you're thinking, wait a sec, Jonathan is going to be sharing some ideas and thoughts about a painting handle? A painting handle?
[2:38] Paint brushes what the heck kind of parallel universe is this well I know I feel it too yo the truth is actually that I was testing these for about five months I started streaming on twitch at the end of June 2024 and i was building lego and painting minis yes i was painting the one who never paints who says, I'm never going to paint anything. I was painting minis. So I have used these and I painted for me quite a lot of things in that span of time. For some of you, I know the quantity of stuff that I painted and even the things I painted don't even pale in comparison, but that's okay. I'm running my own race and you should too. So I'm not just drawing these ideas out of thin air. They are actually based in, like I said, about five months of my experience.
[3:33] So let's talk about the painting handle, okay? Now, I have experience with a few different painting handles. I use the original Games Workshop Citadel painting handle. They have since come out with newer ones. They have an assembly handle. They have like an extra large painting handle. They have a regular painting handle. They have a variety, right? But the one that I started off with was a chonky boi, and they don't make that one anymore. I used it way back. I thought it was going to transform my painting and my hobbying. For a while, it was very useful, but it did not transform anything for me. Now, the difference here, first of all, is that if you are someone who's been using the GW one, and you haven't used any other painting handles out there, so like the GW one, it's made out of a very heavy-duty plastic.
[4:22] And it has magnets in the side that kind of clamp together part of the top to hold the mini in place. And clearly it is designed and intended for use with GW minis and on GW bases, right? So if you're not using something like that, it's not going to work as well for you.
[4:42] Now, Foxbite has you covered, in my opinion anyway. Their painting handle, it's made out of wood. It's a nice hard wood. Feels good in the hand it has some heft but it's not heavy it's you don't feel it's not laborious really is what i'm trying to say so as you're holding it right you're holding it and you have your mini on there and you're painting the mini you don't have that kind of fatigue from having something too heavy it is just right so that it feels good and when you move it you're not just going to be accidentally like and go fling it somewhere you know it's in your hand so it feels nice. It has a good finish on it. So it looks nice as well. It has a bunch of different wooden toppers. So they come in different shapes. There's circles, there's hexagons. They also have different sizes. So there's like smaller ones intended for a single 28 millimeter scale mini, or you could fit a few much smaller minis on there as well. They also have larger ones that are round or hexagon. And when I was using them, I actually used those for, I was doing some really small, I think they're like 15 mil terrain...
[5:53] I was painting houses and things like that. And I was able to get like a whole little farm yard on it and, and paint it like that. So I found it useful for that. Or if you're doing say 15 mil or 10 mil, you could get a whole unit on there and be painting it on one of these larger scale, larger size rather, toppers. The toppers are wood, as I said, again, the same finish as the painting handle and they're not a solid thick chunk that just sits on top of the painting candle. So they are like dremeled out on the inside so that you still have a good size lip going all the way around. So it's not fragile. It doesn't feel like it's going to break on you. It's solid construction, just like the painting handle is. But on the inside, the underside, actually I should say of it there is metallic wafer or disc and that is adhered on with some sort of glue and then that you take the whole topper and it sticks on through magnetism to the top of the painting handle and so they just they adhere really well and I should I'm I'm looking at one of the toppers right now, and I should just make sure to explain that.
[7:10] The part that they Dremel out on the underside of the topper is just enough to fit in that metallic disc or wafer. They don't Dremel any extra out, and the handle has the magnet in it, so it is something that gets a good hold. I should say, though, just to kind of put this out there, instead of doing all like, here's the pros, here's the cons, just kind of popping it in as we're talking about it that sometimes the magnetic discs fall out and i had that happen.
[7:43] I'm told it's fixed in the newer model, but for those who have this older model, or if you have one where it happens that it falls out, it's really an easy fix. You just get a hobby knife and you kind of scratch up the metallic wafer or disc so that you scratch it up. You put some nice solid glue on it. Super glue is going to help press it down, hold it for a while. It's going to connect and set and then you can use it per normal so you are good with that the painting handle comes with it makes me think of like a museum putty but it's some sort of putty so you can use that to adhere your minis to the toppers so that way they stick there while you're painting I found when I was painting that I was not necessarily gluing the minis to the base and then putting them on the painting. You know, sometimes I was just having a mini and I would do the base separately. And so I would use the putty and I'd adhere the mini to the topper. And that can be challenging depending on the type of mini and how it's designed. But generally, the museum putty worked pretty well. It held it pretty good and things just kind of stuck.
[9:03] A problem I came across, though, with the putty, museum putty or whatever it is, is that it is so sticky that it sticks really, really well to anything you put it with. So whether it's minis or the topper, you can get a lot of it off, but it is very sticky for lack of a better word. It just, it is. And so I would spend a significant amount of time going and removing it from the topper or from the mini or the base or whatever. And I have expressed this to the proprietor of Foxbite and they said they're going to try to work on it and see what they can do. But I just wanted to let you know that if you were to go ahead and purchase this, that you might come across that situation as well. You can absolutely get it off. It just takes a while. For me, the best thing that I did was you grab a bunch of the putty and you just keep using the putty to stick to the stuck putty. So if there's putty, right, stuck on the mini, you have some other putty and you just kind of keep on dabbing it and it'll grab putty off a little at a time, a little at a time, and eventually it'll be clear. So that can be difficult to remove, but you can do it. So I just wanted to mention that.
[10:18] Out of all the toppers, I have to say the hexagon ones were my favorite shape. And it's going to sound odd, right? To have a favorite shape. Why would you have a favorite shape topper? What does it matter? And why are they even in different shapes? So maybe it's just my brain playing tricks on me. As we know, my brain does play tricks on me, right? I think all our brains do that, but we know mine does, right? Because I live with anxiety and depression and PTSD and so forth. And so my brain definitely does stuff. I felt like the hexagon shapes were a little sturdier, right? And that they held better to the painting handles. Like the metal discs just were magnetized stronger. And I think part of that is because of the shape, it has that added strength, right? So you probably know that triangles are one of the strongest shapes there are, right? That like they just hold really well. they have a lot of oomph and the circle's not as much right so I found especially in larger sizes, if I was using a really large circle topper and I put it on the painting handle it could wobble a little like if I'm leaning on it that magnet is not strong enough to keep it because it's so much material that it could kind of push down and wobble a little bit and wouldn't be held as much whereas the hexagon was less likely to have that situation so I felt like the hexagon.
[11:47] Was just stronger and more durable that I also think it's more appealing kind of shape which is silly stupid thing but you're used to that for me uh but that it can it just it didn't have as much, excess material because of the shape and so that it was able to hold on more strongly with the magnet, I could be wrong. I could be imagining it,
