A friend of mine had a leaky upstairs toilet, and he didn’t find the problem until it had caused $40,000 in damage to his home. The water destroyed flooring, sheet-rock, and some framing. Zircon’s Leak Alert electronic water detector could’ve saved my friend some grief — you simply place it near sinks, toilets, sump pumps, fish tanks, water heaters, or any other appliances that use water, and the Leak Alert does the rest.
Auto techs who’ve heard the above from customers, rejoice! This week Mac Tools announced a car data recorder that plugs into vehicles’ OBDII data plug and records the entire OBDII data set in a continuous 24-hour loop. Jack this sucker in, send the customer out for a drive, and when they come back you’ve got software access to everything the car knows about the issue.
If you’ve ever tried to strip Teflon- or Radox-shielded cable with a regular pair of snips, you know it can take a while and be super messy by the time you’re done. You can strip that insulation off faster and much more accurately with the double guillotine method. Knipex has adopted that method for their new universal insulation strippers — and, following the lead of razors like the Mach 4, they’ve added blades.
Toolmonger has discussed the value of having a soldering iron in the shop, and many Toolmongers mentioned Weller as a good make to have on your bench. If you want to take that iron off the bench, Weller offers the ML500MP, a portable soldering pencil.
You fuel the piezo-ignition soldering iron with standard lighter butane. The adjustable flame allows you to set the tip to between 750 and 900 degrees. You can get up to 30 minutes of operation on a medium setting. And when you remove the tip, the ML500MP functions as a small torch.
Running network or AV cabling in an older house isn’t hard — passing the “wife test” is another thing entirely. Cables that run across rooms and under the rug are ugly, and you can can only trip over a wire so many times before something gets broken. With WireTracks products, you can install various kinds of electronics wiring behind whatever baseboard or crown molding already exists in a room.
Though it may just look like an odd level, Bosch’s Miter Finder calculates angles within 0.05 degrees. And once you’ve measured an angle within a gnat’s whisker, it tells you what angle to cut for trim installation. That’s not hard with flat molding, but if you want to cut compound angles while keeping the trim flat on the saw, the Miter Finder will do that, too. That means you won’t have to fiddle with crown jigs on your miter saw, and you’ll still get a good fit.
Portable generators rule, but in some situations they aren’t the ideal power source. For example, you can’t use your noisy, messy, and fume-spewing gas generator indoors. That’s when you need a battery-powered solution like Xantrex’s XPower Powerpack 1500.
Sure, it’s not the quality of a Bosch. But hey — for $10 you can own your own heat gun. This cheapie from Harbor Freight works great for shrinking tubing or removing glued-on emblems from vehicles. (Just take your time and don’t melt the paint.)
I need to hit up the Toolmongers for advice on working with RG6 CATV coaxial cable. Firstly, if I need to splice two segments, how should I do it? It needs to be weatherproof; are there specially rated connectors for outdoor use?
I want to get a starter tool set for crimping and/or using compression connectors on RG6. I don’t want to spend an arm and a leg, but on the other hand I’m tired of using the crappy twist-on F-Connectors. Any of you Toolmongers out there know where I can get a cool stripping/crimping kit online that’s good enough for occasional, non-pro use and will last beyond my first crimping job?
I found these online:
DataShark Cable TV “F” Compression Bundle Via Amazon [What’s this?]
F-TYPE 2Ghz VIDEO COUPLER F/F [Cables-to-go]
Paladin SealTite Pro Compression Cable Kit Via Amazon
Paladin Compression Crimp Bundle Via Amazon
It seems to me that I can just pick up the first two and be done with it. Do you have experience with any of these? Are the Paladin kits worth the extra dough?
Of course, we can’t forget the Harbor Freight option:
Coax Cable Tool Kit [Harbor Freight]
Your help on this in comments will be much appreciated.
Laptops are becoming as common as hammers and screwdrivers on the job site - for ordering materials, keeping in touch with home base, and a million other things. But dust, rain, and shock - all part of a day’s work - can bring a laptop to a screeching halt. With this in mind, Getac designed the A790, a hardcore computer for hardcore environments.
We’ve had a chance to see the Maker Store first-hand when we participated in the last two Maker Faire events, and they carry all kinds of cool stuff — perfect stuff for last-minute holiday gifts. Take, for example, their Make-customized version of the much-loved Pocket Ref. Or, you might score a $5 Pinewood Derby car kit for your favorite up-and-coming young woodworker — or a TV-B-Gone kit (pictured) for an electronics fiend (who doesn’t like TVs).
Anyway, we’re generally not big on plugging a specific store, but in this case we make an exception. Why? They not only carry great products that’re assured to inspire, but the money also goes to a good source: another publication that could use the dough.
The Maker Store [MAKE Magazine]
I’ve mentioned Parts Express before off-handedly when recommending that you take a stab at building your own speakers, but I recently had the opportunity to interact with them again — and thought it worth my time to recommend them as a great source for in-wall speakers.
I was looking to ditch the bulky speakers in my bedroom in favor of some in-walls, but most of the ones I found were either uber-pricey or required massive wall mods for proper installation. Once it occurred to me to check out Parts Express, the job simplified dramatically. I ended up ordering five Dayton Audio branded speakers — two fronts, two rears, and a special center channel — all of which are designed for installation in standard 2×4 walls and cost less than $300 shipped.
Operating in tandem with a Sony subwoofer I borrowed from a sub/satellite system I owned years back, these sound great — and look great, too. (Thankfully my crown molding was white anyway, so the speaker grilles look perfect. If yours aren’t, though, they’re paintable.)
Anyway, if you’re considering this kind of project, Parts Express is worth a look.
Parts Express [Corporate Site]
Though he wasn’t exactly clear what was damaged (or unsatisfactory) in the first place, we thought we’d toss a pair of gloves Karl Palutke’s way for having the guts to tear into his slightly-older iPod with nothing but hand tools and hope — and post the photos to Toolmonger’s photo pool.
Hopefully the project ended as well as it started. And Karl, if you have a moment, why not stop by and fill us in on the details in comments?
Toolmonger’s Photo Pool [Flickr]
The best gifts for kids teach them — without looking like they’re anything but cool. Take the Snap Circuit from Elenco for instance. Powered by two AA batteries, it walks youngsters though building everything from an AM radio to a burglar alarm, all via easy-to-understand guides utilizing snap-together components.
Sometimes an 1800-watt heatgun is overkill. That’s when the ProHeater proves handy. Intended for heat-shrink applications, this 350-watt mini-heatgun is also ideal for label removal and other adhesive softening.
You probably won’t find it useful for stripping paint, but it most likely won’t melt your cheap extension cord, either. It’s less bulky than a standard heatgun, and will set you back about twenty bucks.
Street Pricing [Google Products]
Via Amazon
Basic voltage and current measurements from a simple multimeter are adequate for DC electronics work, but when you deal with inductors, an LCR (inductance, capacitance, resistance) meter becomes essential. Siborg’s new Smart Tweezers combine an ergonomic design with a great feature set, targeted squarely at the surfacemount market.
Here’s a tester made just for security installers that might actually live up to its “all in one” claim. It lets you send pan/tilt/zoom commands to cameras and watch the image coming back, and it generates test patterns for monitor setup and identification. It also tests the twisted-pair cable which carries the control signals and decodes those signals to make sure the control console is sending them properly. And it’s a digital multimeter.
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