Category: Tool Hacks

With the availability of increasingly cheaper equipment, welding has become far more accessible these days. While this is definitely a plus, it also comes with the elephant-sized asterisk that as with any tool you absolutely must take into account basic safety precautions for yourself and others. This extends to the way you prepare metal for […]
[Chris Borge] has made (and revised) many of his own tools using a combination of 3D printing and common hardware, and recently decided to try metal casting. Having created his own tapping arm, he tries his hand at aluminum casting to create a much more compact version out of metal. His video (embedded below) really […]
For less than $30 USD, you can get a 10×10 centimeter hotplate with 350 Watts of power. Sounds mighty fine to us, so surely there must be a catch? Maybe not, as [Stefan Nikolaj]’s review of this AliExpress hotplate details, it seems to be just fine enough. At this price, you’d expect some shoddy electronics […]
[Engineezy] might have been watching a 3D printer move when inspiration struck: Why not build a robot arm to clean up his workbench? Why not, indeed? Well, all you need is a 17-foot-long X-axis and a gripper mechanism that can pick up any strange thing that happens to be on the bench. Like any good […]
Resetting the paraffin trap. (Credit: MisterHW) Have you ever tipped all the stray bits of solder out of your tip cleaner by mistake? [MisterHW] is here with a bit pf paraffin wax to save the day. Hand soldering can be a messy business, especially when you wipe the soldering iron tip on those common brass […]
Learning something on YouTube seems kind of modern. But if you are watching a 1957 instructional film about slide rules, it also seems old-fashioned. But Encyclopædia Britannica has a complete 30-minute training film, which, what it lacks in glitz, it makes up for in mathematical rigor. We appreciated that it started out talking about numbers […]
[Metal Massacre Fab Shop] has a review of a portable plasma cutter that ends up being a very good demonstration of exactly what these tools are capable of. If you’re unfamiliar with this kind of work, you might find the short video (about ten minutes, embedded below) to be just the right level of educational. The […]
Sometimes you need to know what temperature something is, but you don’t quite want to touch it. At times like these, you might want a temp gun on hand to get a good reading, like the one [Arnov Sharma] built. The build is a relatively simple one, and is based around an Waveshare ESP32 C6 […]
Things are cooler when rack-mounted, and [KellerLab] aims to make that all far more accessible with the HomeRacker, a modular and 3D-printable rack building system designed to let you rack-mount to your heart’s content. While it can handle big things, it seems especially applicable to tasks like mounting one’s home network equipment and Raspberry Pi […]
When you think of ultrasonics,  you probably think of a cleaner or maybe a toothbrush. If you are a Star Trek fan, maybe you think of knocking out crew members or showers. But there is another practical use of ultrasonics: cutting. By vibrating a blade at 40 kHz or so, you can get clean, precise […]