Tool Hacks

3067 Articles

How-to: Build Your Own Spot Welder

June 23, 2009 by 85 Comments

Spot welders are used in the fabrication of automobiles, PC cases, power supplies, microwave ovens, electrical junction boxes, Faraday cages, and various electronics. A spot welder is used because it produces a highly defined point of contact weld. The materials are welded without excessive heating, so working pieces are handled easily. The weld is also highly controlled and repeatable. In this how-to we cover the basics of a spot welder, and then show you how to build one from a microwave oven transformer.

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Induction Furnace

June 22, 2009 by 19 Comments

induction furnace

[Tim Williams] made his own induction furnace. A copper tubing coil forms the primary winding, as the material to be heated becomes the short circuited secondary. The load material is subject to high power magnetic fields operating at radio frequency. The rapidly changing field induces current flow within the material, creating a great deal of heat. The brute power required a cooling system to match. In the video below, the induction furnace can be seen melting common table salt.

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Homemade Toroid Winder

June 20, 2009 by 17 Comments

[eclipsed78], built an automatic toroid winder (Internet Archive). The drum splits in order to load the toroid. Then wire is wound on the drum, much like any other coil would be wound. The drum rotates as a slider pulls the wire off the drum, while revolving in and out of the toroid. A side tension keeps the slack out of the wire during operation. The winding coil is stepped as the drum rotates, in order to control the turns ratio. [eclipsed78] created a stepper driver from a schematic, so he could drive the motors. You can watch the winder in operation  as a series of videos. The first of which is embedded below. If you have ever needed to wind a massive toroidal transformer, this is the project for you.

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Repair A Malfunctioning LCD

June 20, 2009 by 43 Comments

When most people encounter dead pixels on an LCD text display, they figure that the display is dead and they decide to scrap it. However when the LCD display on one of [Joe]’s cordless phones started to show dead rows and columns of pixels, [Joe] decided that he could fix it. With only a pencil eraser, a hot air gun, and a screwdriver (for disassembly), [Joe] was able to fix his phone’s screen in just under 10 minutes. His process involves heating the glue holding the LCD’s ribbon cable to the phones PCB with a hot air gun and using a pencil eraser to reattach segments of the ribbon cable to the PCB. If anyone here has a problem similar to [Joe]’s, be sure to check out his detailed how-to complete with step-by-step pictures.

2 Axis Joystick From VCR Parts

June 7, 2009 by 5 Comments

joy

[eric] has found that he can build a pretty nice 2 axis joystick out of some VCR parts. Specifically, he’s using the idler wheel. When you disassemble the idler wheel, you’ll find that it has a bevelled washer in the perfect location to help with smooth joystick operation. Add a spring and a hole in some wood and you’ve got the basics. All you need to add now are the switches. This is a fantastic example of recycling parts, you never would have guessed that it was made from trash.