also in shop talk
Apr. 9th, 2022 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdA few weeks ago a friend of mine bought a dremel tool press - like a drill press, but for use with your dremel tool - and I was all "don't buy the dremel press it's shite and doesn't work" at him on Twitter.
Mine always did this kind of very-slight-arc bullshit on the way up and down, and as soon as the tool on the end made contact with the material I was trying to work it would slide over a bit, defeating the entire point of having a press. I always imagined it was just because of being way too flimsy and made for maybe balsa and foam or some bullshit like that where it didn't matter.
But he was doing something with metal and reported that his worked fine, so last night I finally took my useless one properly apart - like, past user-assembly apart...
...and found the internal manufacturing defect.
There's a tightening bolt inside mine that wasn't because the nut it was threaded into wasn't, or wasn't properly, threaded. I fixed that, and hey look, now it works.
Go fig.
I mean, stability's still a bit soft because plastics, right? But now it's genuinely just "because plastics" and not "because not bolted down right." So I'm still not a huge fan but at least now it goes straight up and down. xD
Mine always did this kind of very-slight-arc bullshit on the way up and down, and as soon as the tool on the end made contact with the material I was trying to work it would slide over a bit, defeating the entire point of having a press. I always imagined it was just because of being way too flimsy and made for maybe balsa and foam or some bullshit like that where it didn't matter.
But he was doing something with metal and reported that his worked fine, so last night I finally took my useless one properly apart - like, past user-assembly apart...
...and found the internal manufacturing defect.
There's a tightening bolt inside mine that wasn't because the nut it was threaded into wasn't, or wasn't properly, threaded. I fixed that, and hey look, now it works.
Go fig.
I mean, stability's still a bit soft because plastics, right? But now it's genuinely just "because plastics" and not "because not bolted down right." So I'm still not a huge fan but at least now it goes straight up and down. xD
no subject
Date: 2022-04-10 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-11 01:28 am (UTC)Really, though, I only found it because I flipped a retention nut around while reassembling the stupid thing. I couldn't get the bolt it supports to screw into it at all, and I'm like, "...that's, like, totally wrong" and figured out from there that the threads were fucked up on one side of the retainer.
This meant that if you tightened the bolt down, it would feel like it was tight. You couldn't get it any further by hand. But the retaining bolt was actually retaining the bolt from applying the anti-rotation pressure it was put there to do. (Literally its only job!) And you couldn't tell from the outside, it just... wouldn't work.
All I had to do was fix the threads and suddenly it's usable.