Iwata Raised Ridge Airbrush Cleaning Mat First Look

By Michael Benolkin

First Look

Here is a nice new item from Iwata-Medea - an airbrush cleaning mat. This is a simple rubber mat with a laminated fabric surface that has raised edges around the perimeter. The rubber surface on the underside will cling to whatever surface it is placed upon which provides a handy work surface that could be placed on not-so-level surfaces like a car hood. When you take your airbrush apart for cleaning, the raised ridges will keep the parts from rolling onto the floor/ground and disappearing.

While Iwata developed this product for keeping those expensive airbrush parts from rolling away, it only took a second for me to see the essential utility of this mat for far more purposes. How many times have you been removing drive sprockets, return rollers, and road wheels from a tank kit in progress and having to retrieve some of them that roll away? This mat will be very handy for de-sprueing parts (though you're still on your own for those that fly away). This mat will also be handy for dismantling other projects that are not modeling-related and keeping them in a contained space until they're put into other storage or reassembled. Talk about a solution for many different work bench projects!

You can find the Iwata Raised Ridge Airbrush Cleaning Mat at your favorite hobby shop and if not, they can special order it for you. In the meantime, you can read more about these and the other cool products from Iwata by visiting their website at http://www.iwata-airbrush.com/

My sincere thanks to Iwata Media for this review sample!