Quick Review of the Painting Handle MK3

 Recently GW rebranded from Citadel Paints to Warhammer paints, in the process they released three new essential hobby sets: A set of 20 12mm Dice, a hobby tool set and the painting handle MK3. I do not have much to say about the dice set, they are overpriced small D6s which most likely will easily get lost if they roll off the table; The tool set is simply a single release of the tools previously only found in the citadel paints and tools set. I have my theory that the 40 bucks pair of clippers did not sell as well as they though so this is a more budget friendly alternative; Lastly we have the new painting handle, considering it is an actually new product I felt I needed to give it a try. This article is more a byproduct of me trying the painting handle for work; Since I often get people who want to start the hobby I feel like I should have a decent grasp of how good the products that we sell are(hence why I have six pair of clippers from various manufacturers).

Anyways, with all the preamble out of the way, how does this thing work? Well unlike the previous three incarnations of the painting handle, this thing does not feature the spring-loaded mechanism to secure the miniatures; In a bid to make this thing as cheap as possible, this is pretty much a single cast piece of plastic; They even skipped the usual bottom plug which leads to this very amusing situation where you can just look straight through this thing:

Regardless of that amusing fact, how do you mount miniatures into this thing then? Well you are supposed to bend the arms down as to open it up just enough to fit a miniature between the 'teeth' and then let go, the material springing back into its original shape and locking down the miniature. In theory this is just the cheap version of what the spring loaded variants did, where you would pull apart the springs to mount your miniature and then let go, letting the springs return to their normal length and locking the miniature.. However, there is one, slight, tiny, miniscule wrinkle with that design:

It is too tight and bends your bases!

Seriously, whoever designed this thing did not test how well the bases fit into it and how much pressure the material applies. Unlike the spring-loaded versions, the amount of pressure exerted by the 'teeth' on the base is way too high, leading me to believe that the resting state is much smaller than 25mm. 

Trying other base sizes lead to the same results and got even worse due to the longer base. Not wanting the bases to get bent permanently I removed them quickly, but I assume if left in longer like I usually do with my other painting handles they would get bent permanently. How or why this product got past any kind of testing or quality assurance baffles me, but considering that we saw similar blunders from quality assurance recently there seems to be a growing trend. 

In conclusion, do NOT buy this product; It is incredibly cheaply made and is most likely going to damage your miniatures. I am definitely not going to recommend this to any customer looking to start in the hobby and instead go for the MK2 Handle or ones from a competitor. 

I hope you enjoyed this small review, I felt it important to share my experience, since this is a shockingly bad product, even for a GW hobby product(looking at you Rakarth Flesh).