Tool Review – Heat Gun

In this post, I want to show you a heat gun and tell you what this tool is good for. I will also tell you about some applications for this tool, in model building but also at home or in the garage. The heat gun works basically the same way as a hair dryer. It just takes air from the environment and heats it, blowing it out.

This particular tool was delivered with four accessories. These are basically accessories that you place on the hot air outflow of the heat gun.

• The first one from the left distributes the hot air on a broad surface and helps you heat a big area evenly. You could use this to heat a big area, such as the front end of a model car, and evenly re-mould it as a crash or dent or a big fender bender. Another application for this would be to heat car foil wrap – used on real cars -, where you heed to heep a bigger surface hot in order to apply it on a car. Car foil wrap can be great to apply some details such as rally stripes and is far less expensive than painting. Depending on how good you are on manual work, you can do it yourself.
• The second accessory from the left is used to focus the hot air stream onto one point. For instance, you could use this to heat one specific plastic part you want to mould. This can also be use to heat parts glued together, thus weakening the glue and be able to detach the pieces – for example, I’ve seen this used to take out the front glass of tablet computers in order to open them up and fix broken parts.
• Both the third and fourth accessories are used to strip paint from a surface. For instance, if you want to get paint off a wooden surface, you can use such a heat gun with one of those accessories.

Other uses for heat guns are:

• Shrink wrapping
• Desolder electronics
• Paint drying
• Restore faded plastic trimming on cars. You may know that plastic trimming may turn “greyish” after some years. With the heat gun, you can make them look black again.
• Window tinting using tint film

The tool as such is really simple. You have a power switch (at the very bottom of the picture), a fan speed regulator and a temperature regulator. Besides, you have a display that show you the current temperature coming out of the heat gun and the fan rpm. This heat gun features temperatures between 50 degrees Celsius and 630 degrees Celsius or 122 degrees Fahrenheit to 1100 degrees Fahrenheit – this is a 2000 Watt heat gun, there are other with less power, thus they reach less temperature. So, please be careful while using this tool: use safety gloves and use it in a ventilated area – specially if you are going to apply it on plastic or paints, as this can free solvents that can be harmful to breath.

The rubber knobs shown on the previous picture are useful to put the heat gun aside, with out it touching the table nor anything else with the hot end, as shown above.

Just to give you an example: the structure of the soft top on that Mustang above as donde with styrene strips, which I bent using the heat gun at a minimum temperature.

Tagged as: heat gun, how to make a crashed model car car, how to make dents, Tool Review