Tamiya Electric Handy Drill

From time to time we in the modeling community run across the need to sink a hole, or two, or three. Or many more, If you're building an SBD Dauntless and don't have photoetch for those dive brakes.

As most of us are inclined to work on things with our hands anyway many will have a shop full of big, scary electric drills for more 'manly' projects around the house, tools that are usually bigger than the model itself. Our Dremel units are not much better here, with unwieldy bulk and RPM ratings so high that the plastic starts to melt from the friction-heat buildup in a matter of seconds. Even our pen-shaped hand drills are tiresome to use and difficult to keep straight, as the hand is busy providing the rotation and accuracy often suffers as a result, especially with holes in repetition.

Enter Tamiya's answer to this problem. This kit (yes, kit) has been around for many years now, but I think most of us have overlooked it as something beneath us (again, the shop full of tools) or a product aimed at the younger crowd.

I received mine, wrapped and under the tree, after getting curious about it and putting it on my Christmas list. A colorful, rather optimistic box encloses three sprues: one grey, one blue, and one orange. A couple bags of metal parts also greet you further within, plus a little tube of light machine grease. The pamphlet of instructions advise the tools required for the following assembly across six steps, with notes in Japanese and concurrent English. Two collets are supplied for different sizes of bits. A single 2mm drill bit is included. 

Assembly took place over a very pleasant hour, and was reminiscent of R/C and other such 'operational' Tamiya products I have constructed in the past, only in abbreviated form. If you've built anything by this company you know their instructions are second to none and the sprues and little baggies of parts are all divided up and annotated clearly. A pair of fresh AA batteries were all that were required to complete the project. In a very short time, I was annoying family members after Christmas dinner by wandering about with the little device, pressing the trigger, and supplementing the resulting electric motor noise with sci-fi laser gun sounds. Zzzzz! Zzzzz! Pew!  

Within a day or two the tool was put to work placing 12 holes for the radar antennae in each fuselage side of my DAP Beaufort. Not only is the little drill light and easy to use, but the low RPM count (in the few hundreds, rather than thousands) kept the heat buildup down and also made the action much more controllable, as the effects of torque and gyroscopic precession are minimized to the point of being a non-factor. The plastic never melted (not even close), and by placing a little divot with a pin to function like a pilot hole at each location I had 24 accurately-placed and uniform little holes in just a few minutes. This task would have taken me far longer and not come out as well otherwise.

As stated above, the drill comes with two collets: one holds bits from .9mm to about 2mm, the other 2mm to around 1/8". As the tool obviously holds only one at a time, I lost track of the larger collet and now really regret it, as I keep finding more and more applications for this neat little drill. I'm currently using it several times on each model.

'Handy drill', indeed! Once again, even with a couple Dremel tools in my possession and a shop outside with several more drills of various descriptions, Tamiya’s little drill has turned out to be a most useful addition to my workbench.

 Ryan Grosswiler

July 2025

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