Tool Hacks

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Mini Camera Crane For Your Workbench

October 5, 2021 by 10 Comments

If you’ve ever tried to document a project on your workbench with photos or videos, you know the challenge of constantly moving tripods to get the right shot. [Mechanistic] is familiar with this frustration, so he built a small desktop camera crane.

Heavily inspired by [Ivan Miranda]’s large camera crane, this build scales it down and mainly uses 3D printed parts. The arm of the crane can pivot along two axes around the base, uses a parallel bar mechanism to keep the camera orientation constant through its vertical range of motion. The camera mount itself allows an additional 3 degrees of freedom to capture any angle and can mount a DSLR or smartphone. To offset the weight of the camera, an adjustable counterweight is added to the rear of the arm. Every axis of rotation can be locked using thumbscrews.

We can certainly see a crane like this being useful on our workbench for more than just camera work. You could create attachments for holding lights, displays, multimeters, or some helping hands. For some tips on creating an engaging project video check out [Lewin Day]’s excellent video on the subject.

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A soldering iron applied to a stuck threadlocked screw in a titanium pen

Removing Threadlocked Screws With A Soldering Iron

October 4, 2021 by 27 Comments

We’ve all been there – that last stubborn screw, the one thing between you and some real progress on a repair or restoration. It’s stuck tight with thread-locking fluid, and using more torque threatens to strip the head. Frustration mounting, drilling that sucker out is starting to seem pretty tempting. But wait! [Daniel] offers a potential solution using nothing but a soldering iron.

This tool hack is pretty simple, but all the great ones tend to be straightforward. In the video, [Daniel] is faced with a titanium Torx screw that refuses to come loose due to threadlocker, an adhesive that is applied to screws and other fasteners to prevent them coming loose. Available in a variety of strengths, thread-locking fluid is great at keeping screws where they need to be, but too much (or the wrong kind) can seize a screw permanently.

Instead of drilling out the offending screw, [Daniel] reaches for his soldering iron. By applying a significant amount of heat to the screw head, the adhesive starts to give. After heating, working the screw back and forth breaks the threadlocker, thus freeing the screw. The whole process takes just a couple of minutes, and potentially saves the repairer from destroying a screw.

The chemistry behind thermoset adhesives makes for some great bedtime reading, however the main takeaway is that threadlock fluid, while somewhat resistant to heat, will eventually become brittle enough for the screw to come loose. Unlike most adhesives, which melt under high temperature (think glue sticks), thermoset materials tend to initially harden with the application of heat, before turning brittle and breaking. While high-temperature threadlocker derivatives exist, typical Loctite-branded threadlocker (and similar products) would not appear to be able to stand the heat of a typical soldering iron.

This soldering iron hack isn’t the first we’ve featured on Hackaday – check out this method on removing enamel from magnet wire. If you’re not too squeamish, also check out our thoughts on soldering iron cauterization.

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CO2 laser cutting ceramic sheet under water film

Water Is The Secret Ingredient When Laser Cutting Ceramics To Make Circuits

October 2, 2021 by 21 Comments

[Ben Krasnow] over at Applied Science was experimenting with cutting inexpensive ceramic sheets with his cheap CO2 laser cutter when he found that (just as expected) the thermal shock of the CO2 beam would cause cracking and breaking of the workpiece. After much experimentation, he stumbled upon a simple solution: submersion under a thin layer of water was sufficient to remove excess heat, keeping thermal shock at bay, and eventually cutting the material. Some prior art was uncovered, which we believe is this PHD thesis (PDF) from Manchester University in the UK. This is a great read for anyone wanting to dig into this technique a little deeper.

The CO2 laser cutter is a very versatile tool, capable of cutting and etching a wide range of materials, many of natural origin, such as cardboard, leather and wood, as well as certain plastics and other synthetic materials. But, there are also materials that are generally a no-go, such as metals, ceramics and anything that does not absorb the laser wavelength adequately or is too reflective, so having another string in one’s bow is a good thing. After all, not everyone has access to a fibre laser.

After dispensing with the problem of how to cut ceramic, it got even more interesting. He proceeded to deposit conductive traces sufficiently robust to solder to. A mask was made from vinyl sheet and a squeegee used to deposit a thick layer of silver and glass particles 1 um or less in size. This was then sintered in a small kiln, which was controlled with a Raspberry Pi running PicoReFlow, and after a little bit of scrubbing, the surface resistance was a very usable 2 mΩ/square. Holes cut with the laser, together with some silver material being pushed through with the squeegee formed through holes with no additional effort. That’s pretty neat!

Some solder paste and parts were added to the demo board, and with an added flare for no real reason other than he could, reflowed by simply applying power direct to the board. A heater trace had been applied to the bottom surface, rendering the board capable of self-reflowing. Now that is cool!

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Photo of Pixel Pump Pick & Place Machine

Pixel Pump Pick & Place Positions Parts Precisely

October 1, 2021 by 18 Comments

You’ve finally decided to take the plunge and build a board with surface-mount parts. After carefully dispensing the solder paste with a syringe, it’s time to place the parts. You take up your trusty tweezers and reach to grab a SOIC-14 logic IC—only there’s not a great way to grab it. The IC is too long to grab one way and has leads obstructing the other. You work around the leads, drop the IC into place, and then pick up an 0402 resistor. You gently set the resistor into your perfectly dispensed solder paste, pull the tweezers away, and the resistor has stuck to your slightly magnetic tweezers. [Robin Reiter] realized that hobbyists and small manufacturers needed a better way to assemble their surface-mount designs, so he’s building the Pixel Pump Pick & Place, an open-source vacuum assembly tool.

Vacuum assembly tools use a blunt-tipped needle and suction to pick up surface-mount parts. Pressing an attached foot pedal disables the vacuum, allowing the part to be gently released. [Robin] thought to include a few thoughtful features to make the Pixel Pump even more useful. It has adjustable suction presets and a self-cleaning feature to blow out any solder paste you accidentally suck up. Most of the non-electronic parts are 3D printed, and [Robin] intends to make the entire design open-source.

[Robin] has a long history of designing tools to make surface-mount assembly easier—you may remember his 3D-printed magazines for dispensing surface-mount parts. If you want to take your PCB assembly setup to the next level, check out the PnPAssist, which shines a laser crosshair right where you should put each part.

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Modern Tube Tester Uses Arduino

September 24, 2021 by 13 Comments

There was a time when people like us might own a tube tester and even if you didn’t, you probably knew which drug store had a tube testing machine you could use for free. We aren’t sure that’s a testament to capitalistic ingenuity or an inditement of tube reliability — maybe both. As [Usagi] has been working on some tube-based projects, he decided he needed a tester so he built one. You can see the results in the video, below.

The tester only uses 24V, but for the projects he’s building, that’s close to the operation in the real circuits. He does have a traditional tube tester, but it uses 100s of volts which is a different operating regime.

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A weld bead laid down with homemade CO2

Cooking Up A Batch Of Homebrew Welding Gas

September 21, 2021 by 31 Comments

You know the feeling — you’re making good progress on a weekend project, you’re really in the groove, things are going right. Right up until you run out of That One Thing™ that you can’t do without, the only store that sells it is closed, and you get a sudden case of whiplash as your progress hits a virtual brick wall.

Of course, every challenge holds the opportunity to hack your way around it, which is how [Lucas] ended up building this carbon dioxide generator. The “IG” in MIG welding stands for the “inert gas” that floods the weld pool and keeps the melted metal — the “M” in MIG — from rapidly oxidizing and ruining the weld. Welders often use either straight CO2 or a mix of CO2 and argon as a MIG shielding gas, which they normally get from a commercial gas supplier, generally on non-weekend days.

[Lucas] turned to grade-school chemistry for his CO2 generator, using the vigorous reaction of baking soda and vinegar to produce the gas. Version one was sketchy as all get-out; the second iteration still had some sketch factor thanks to the use of ABS pipe, but the inclusion of a relief valve should prevent the worst from happening. After some fiddling with how to get the reagents together in a controlled fashion, [Lucas] was able to generate enough CO2 to put down a decent bead — a short one, to be sure, but the video below shows that it worked.

Could this be scaled up to something for practical use? Probably not. But it’s cool to see what’s possible, and something to file away for a rainy day. And maybe [Lucas] can use this method to produce CO2 for his homemade laser tube. But again, probably not.

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Robert Murray Smith Discusses Rivets and Riveting

Old School Fastener Tutorial Is Riveting

September 10, 2021 by 18 Comments

Whether you’re making, repairing, or hacking something together, we all need fastners. Screws, nuts and bolts, and pop rivets are handy sometimes. Various resins and even hot glue are equally useful. In some cases however the right fastener for the job eludes us, and we need another trick up our sleeve.

[Robert Murray Smith] found himself in such a position. His goal was to join two pieces of aluminum that need a nice finish on both sides. Neither glue, pop rivets, screws, nuts or bolts would have been appropriate.  [Robert] is always flush with ideas both new and old, and he resorted to using an old school fastener as explained as explained in his video “How To Make And Use Rivets“.

In the video below the break, [Robert] goes into great detail about making a simple rivet die from a 5mm (3/16”) piece of flat steel, creating the rivet from a brass rod, and then using the flush rivet to join two pieces of aluminum. The simple tooling he uses makes the technique available to anybody with a propane torch, a vise, some basic tools, and a simple claw hammer. We also appreciate [Robert]’s discussion of cold riveting, hot riveting, and annealing the rivets as needed.

Not only is riveting a technique thousands of years old, its advancement and application during the Industrial Revolution enabled technologies that couldn’t have existed otherwise. Hackaday’s own [Jenny List] did a wonderful write up about rivets in 2018 that you won’t want to miss!

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