Two Indispensable & Inexpensive Tools

Tools can be expensive, but here's no getting around the fact that you've really got to have the right tool for the right job. The trick, sometimes, is knowing where to look, because sometimes you can find the right tools in unexpected places.

There are a couple of tools that I use all the time, and I didn't find them in an electronics shop. I found both of them in my wife's stash of scrapbooking tools & supplies (this stash being approximately the size of our dining room...and three-season porch...and a bit of the basement). You can find them in any half decent hobby or craft store, or in any of a thousand places online. Locally, our craft stores include Michael's, A.C. Moore, and Hobby Lobby and all of them carry these items.

Before I start talking about these tools, let me first tell you a little story...

Way back in the day (1988, if you must know), my first job after graduating from RPI with an Electrical Engineering degree was at the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Center at McLean Hospital, in Belmont, MA. I was the sole engineer in the department, and, truth be told, they didn't really know they wanted an engineer at the time - they just wanted to replace a departed technician. But Dr. Scott Lukas saw the potential of having an imaginative engineer on staff in an environment where you frequently had to invent the gadgets needed to do the work, so he took a chance on me. And being fresh out of school, I was working for peanuts - at least at first.

So I got to do it all - hardware, software, mechanical design & fabrication. It really was a dream job, and the perfect vehicle for me to try my hand at a variety of disciplines. Embedded systems as we know them now were in their infancy. We had banks of Apple IIgs computers in one room controlling experiments in another, connected by bundles of 30 conductor cables and a series of connectors, all of which I had to wire up by hand.

 During my years there, I advanced the level of technology considerably, but there was infrastructure in place (like the cables and connectors) that I just had to deal with. So my work also included a fair bit of troubleshooting and repair, especially at the beginning. So when it came time to design upgrades and replacements, I tried to roll in all the lessons I learned up to that point.

 One of the first things I learned was that heat-shrink tubing is worth its weight in gold. My predecessor didn't believe in strain-relieving cables or insulating connections, and so much of my early troubleshooting led me to find short circuits and broken connector pins - and inside of a 30-pin connector housing, not only was that annoying, it also did damage to other, more expensive equipment.

Heat Gun
One of my first purchases, once I got sick of fixing short circuits, was a heat gun, like this one but actually a bit simpler:

It worked great, and - relatively speaking - didn't cost too much. I say "relatively speaking" because, at the time, it cost about $75. That's really not horrible, even today. I checked out Digikey as I was working on this post, and found heat guns in the range of about $50 - $900, with my needs well-addressed at the low end of that scale. Still, I hate to part with that much money for something that's, let's face it, just a glorified hair dryer. At this point, my wife reminds me that, having little hair remaining myself, I have no clue how much hair dryers can cost these days. Fair point.

I love heat shrink tubing, for a variety of tasks. There's the obvious one, insulating connections and wire splices and such. I also use it to color code cables & connections, and lately I've even been using it when framing photos - I cover the twisted ends of the hanging wire with it, to make it more secure. The search was on for an affordable heat gun, but to no avail, at least not in the usual places.

And then I found the solution right under my nose. Well, sitting at the dining room table anyway. As I've explained before, my wife is an avid scrapbooker, card maker, and a talented, creative, crafty person in general. She uses a lot of rubber stamps, and let me tell you, there's a lot more to that than I'd have ever expected!

One cool thing you can do with rubber stamps is create an embossed effect. You do this with embossing powder, which comes in about a million different colors. You stamp a design on paper (or whatever) and, while the ink is still wet, sprinkle embossing powder over it. You then shake off the excess powder and heat what remains to melt the powder into a raised design. Pretty cool! And guess what? The heat gun works great on heat shrink tubing and is pretty inexpensive. My wife's cost a whopping $20, and I've seen them as low as $15. Perfect!

I wish I could claim this as a unique flash of brilliance, but the last time I was at You-Do-It Electronics (Needham, MA - check 'em out here), they had an assortment of these very same inexpensive tools alongside the expensive ones in their heat-shrink department (I'm not kidding, they have a huge selection of heat shrink everything).

This craft heat gun has done everything I've needed it to do, and it's so inexpensive as to be almost disposable. And that's good, because I had to get my wife a new one, since hers found its way into my toolbox!

Heated knife kit

One thing I'm especially bad at is cutting holes that aren't round. I'm not a machinist, I'm not a whiz with a router, so if you can't do it with a drill, I struggle a bit with it. For that very reason, I avoid  slide switches, rockers, or any panel-mount component that requires a rectangular cutout.

One tool I've found that at least helps with this dilemma is the hot knife. I found this tool in my wife's hands one day, using it to cut foam core for a project. Basically, it's the perfect union of an X-Acto knife with a soldering iron.

She has a hot knife kit that came with an assortment of tips for a different projects:

• Letters
• Symbols
• Chisel / stylus
• Pointed (like a soldering tip)

This tool is great for foam core and styrofoam, but also works very well on thermoplastics, like the stuff of which many project boxes are made. I've never tried soldering with it, but it does come with a couple of tips that look right for the job.

It takes a while for the hot knife to heat up enough to cut plastic, so don't be impatient. It's worth the wait! And also, you obviously need to hold this like you'd hold a soldering iron, not as you'd hold an X-Acto knife, at least if you value your fingertips. In that sense, it's a little awkward to use for cutting plastic, but you get used to it quickly enough.

Get into the habit of cleaning the plastic off the blade as soon as you're done using it. I don't know if it hurts the blade at all, but it gums up the works and you'll have to clean it next time you use it anyway.

There you have it, a couple of useful tools from unlikely places. If you have anything to add, either about these tools or others that you've found, please leave a comment!

DIY Toys: Uncle Steve's Gift

A long time ago, my Uncle Steve made me a birthday present. When I say a long time, I mean maybe 40 years ago. I was little, maybe 5, maybe 8, I’m not sure. And I assume it was a birthday present because I remember playing with it outside in warm weather, and my birthday is in the middle of July.


The present was handmade, and simple enough: a pair of ‘D’ batteries, soldered together; a toggle switch; and an incandescent lamp with a cylindrical amber lens. These three items were wired together so the switch turned the lamp on and off. The whole thing was enclosed in a small cardboard box wrapped in black electrical tape. It couldn't have been simpler.

Today, I suppose you’d call such a thing a "Busy Box" or a “Do Nothing” box. That’s no insult; it's a class of gadgets whose primary purpose it to entertain and stimulate the imagination.

That it did.

That little box was anything I wanted it to be. It was a communicator from Star Trek, a walkie-talkie, a remote control for a rocket or a robot or whatever else I could imagine – and I could imagine a lot. It was a homing device, and a treasure detector, and a night light, too. Quite honestly, it was one of my favorite toys of all time. I was heartbroken when the batteries finally died, but I (clearly) never forgot it.

I have no idea where that most wonderful of toys ended up - probably in a landfill somewhere. What you see in the pictures is a replica I made just for this blog. There are a couple of differences:

• Though still wrapped in electrical tape, the enclosure is a plastic project box, not cardboard.
• The batteries are in a battery holder, not soldered together.
• The incandescent lamp has been replaced by a warm white LED (but I still managed to find an amber lamp holder, thanks to You-Do-It Electronics in Needham, MA!).

I decided to make a slightly updated version of the same toy, as a gift for Uncle Steve, but that's a whole different post. Stay tuned! In the meantime,

Beam me up, Scotty!!

About Uncle Steve

For as long as I can remember, my Uncle Steve has operated an Office Machine shop. When I was little, that meant typewriters and cash registers and a never-ending supply of gears and levers and other little mechanical bits and pieces. Then word processors began to move in, sometime in the 80s, I think, and not long thereafter, computers and printers.

My Uncle has had to stay abreast of technology as it pertained to office machines, just so he could stay in business and support his family. He's the guy that turned me on to Nuts & Volts magazine, for example. He also let me borrow his Heathkit Electronics Training Course materials & hardware way back before I could ever afford such a thing on my own.

As one of the only technically-inclined members of the family, he always encouraged me in my own geeky interests, and is one of the only adults I could talk to about such things that actually understood what I was talking about. For that, Uncle, I am eternally grateful!