The Little World

A stick.

Now that we’ve gotten the classic dad joke off the board, we can continue to the real topic of this post: the cocktail stick.

Also known as the wooden skewer, satay stick, or kebab stick, this thin bamboo or wood shaft is available in any grocery store or Asian shop. Bundles of a hundred are pitifully cheap. They are used in a lot of Asian cooking and barbecues. Seen as a throw-away item, they are also remarkably durable.

I keep the contents of one of those hundred bundles distributed in three workplaces and use them for an increasing number of tasks. They have supplanted a lot of specialist metal tools. Some of the uses include:

1. Holding model parts while they are being painted – particularly wheels or engines.
2. Painting masking fluid on canopies and wings.
3. Touch up painting.
4. Cleaning out panel lines before painting.
5. Mixing paint.
6. Applying adhesives.
7. Propping up aircraft during painting.
8. Wedging models at odd angles on building stands.
9. Building windows with Micro Krystal Kleer PVA.

I form any number of custom shapes in wood at the end of the skewers to hold cyanoacrylate glue when I need to poke it into tiny spaces. These applicators are perfectly re-usable.