My Dremel

I haven't had the time to blog in a while and a lot has happened so I will have to wade though all the back log. I bought a Dremel 300 to use on the Mc Wire RepStrap. I should mention that I finished building ( and testing) all the electronics this weekend and am just waiting for some Perspex to mount all the PCB's on.

Here is the Dremel in its box.

Here is the Dremel's carry case.

Here is the Dremel.


The idea for the Dremel is that it will let me etch PCB's with it and mill things like aluminium and wood, plastic too. Here is the instructables link: http://www.instructables.com/id/Easy-to-Build-Desk-Top-3-Axis-CNC-Milling-Machine/ and here is the RepStrap link: http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/McWire_Cartesian_Bot_1_2

Drill Press

This past weekend my Dad found an old drill press hidden away in the hardware. It's from 1613BC & weighs 6 tons. (It took me about 20min to clean it from all the dust) Its a manual drill press! You have to wind a handle to make it work! There are two speeds! slow & very slow! I attempted to drill ~150 holes for the arduino board using this drill press. Take a look at the raw power in the video!

I tried to drill a hole... Broke the first bit on the first try! The chuck comes down with too much force & when the pit hits the fiber glass it snaps! This was with a 1mm bit! I put a new bit in & tried to control the decent a bit better. I then realised that if I let go the handle, the momentum from the top piece of spinning metal at the top, is enough to make the handle swing round with enough force to knock teeth out! I got fed up very quickly with this... It just wasn't going to work!
This how ever was! :) Its a Ryobi drill press, with 5 speeds & a 13mm chuck! Cost me R450! It was a demo model at some other hardware & they wanted to get rid of it... & I wanted it!

Here you can see it in action! I didn't set the bit in the chuck 100% so it wobbled a bit... I just wanted to test it out & drill some holes! Works like a dream! (& yes, when I drill proper boards I will have 1 hand holding the PCB & 1 on the acent/decent leaver so the PCB wont spin!)

changing tips on a magnum 1002

There were no instructions in the box on how to change tips on my magnum 1002 solder iron, looking back I should have google'd around a bit before doing what I did!
So I unscrewed what I thought was just a heat shield. Nothing happened & the original tip seamed to be firmly held in place still... what i should had done was pulled it a bit harder, it would have come off & then I could have swapped it out with the SMD tip... unfortunately that's not what I did! :(
I took apart the body of the soldering iron! This is a big mistake... I have made it so no one else needs to make it.
Out of interest this is the other side.
All this time the original tip was still in, only once the iron was apart did it fall out. I put it back together. there is the SMD tip I bought, which i later found out is a terrible tip to work with :(
a glowing tip... I don't think so... there is obviously a BIG problem! Not what I need right now...