A-Case Magnetic Painting Handle Honest Review

Disclosure: A-Case sent me one of their painting handles to use and review, this review is my honest opinion and is not influenced by A-Case in any way.

The A-Case System

A-Case is best known for its army transportation cases that have metal shelves that are made to use magnetized bases to hold your army in place. The painting handles are a continuation of that system by using magnetized bases to hold your minis while you paint. Since the magnets are already in place it makes it simple to transition to using their cases. or metal shelving to store them at home.

My Overall Opinion of the A-Case Painting Handle

For those who don’t want to read the entire review, I like the A-Case painting handle and would recommend it to people looking for a painting handle. The basic kit is reasonably priced and arrived from Europe to my home in the US fairly quickly. The build quality exceeded my expectations for 3D-printed objects by a large margin. from here on I will be going into more detail about the handle and how I felt it worked.

Comfort

I have average size hands, and the A-Case painting handle is comfortable and fits my hand pretty well. In the image below you can see that my little finger is at the absolute bottom of the handle. The magnetic heads allow you to add a layer to give more room for larger hands. I would recommend that you avoid adding more than one extra head as a buffer though as the layers will become easily dislodged if you have too many of them.

I was a little skeptical before it arrived because often 3D printed objects have large ridges that I thought might be uncomfortable with prolonged use, but A-Case actually polishes the handles to remove the rough imperfections that are often associated with the filament 3D printing process. It also comes in a variety of colors, I chose the bright orange one because I thought it was a fun color.

There is also a magnet in the base of the handle, that was convenient for setting it out of the way while I was working on assembling some other minis. I just attached it to the base of my desk lamp and didn’t ever have to worry about it rolling away.

Interchangeable heads

I like that the handle has magnetic interchangeable heads for supporting your minis. This made switching between minis quick and easy. I am often working on squads of minis and being able to just have them all attached to different heads and swap them out is a real plus for a painting handle.

The handle came with 5 heads to use interchangeably, they have different textures on them and all of them work quite well.

There is an option for larger heads that will hold your medium base minis as well as one that has a cork for pinning minis or bits to it.

Magnet pros and cons for painting handles

The magnets hold the minis in place securely just fine without too much fuss even when airbrushing. I was pleasantly surprised that one 5mm magnet was able to do the job quite well. I also glued my fingers to more than one of the magnets, so watch out.

This is the only handle that I am aware of that uses magnets to hold your minis in place. Magnets are simple enough to glue to the inside of hollow bases that come with the majority of gaming miniatures, but if you print your own minis most of those bases will need to be drilled in order to attach magnets.