Hey guys! OK, here I’ll show you how to make a hand-held, sort of a “dremel”.
It’s not perfect but it’s powerful enough to cut through thin sheets of metal or big wires, or drill holes in metal. It’s really simple and it cost me NOTHING as I have found all the parts around the house (except for the alligator clamps. They cost me 60 cents).
Some steps have been updated a little.
If you are not going drill holes with it, you could use it as a hand-held fan. Skip to the end to see how it looks like :)
This is how it should look like when it’s done:
Items you will need
1. Tube/Pipe – I used a PVC one, 3 cm in diameter and I’ve cut ~14 cm in length of it.
2. Motor – it depends on what you want to drill or cut. I wanted to use not just for drilling so I used a stronger motor.
Sorry for the confusion – in first photo you may notice a different motor which is somewhat this than it’s on other photos. This is because after I took that photo, I noticed that the current motor just spins really fast but doesn’t have any strength, so when you push little harder, it stops. I found a stronger one which is similar to this. Motor I used is from an inkjet printer. I found a non-working printer thrown away so i picked it up and dismantled it for parts. 9v isn’t enough for this so I used a different battery. About that later…
3. Alligator clamps – small ones, used in electronics
4. Tape or shrink tubes for isolating wires. I used tape.
5. Hot glue
6. Some wires and a long wire for the power.
7. Push button
8. Small drill-chuck. Special for this kind of drills. I have a similar to this.
Put everything together
1. Take the motor and put as much tape as needed. The motor must fit just right and it can’t be too loose.
2. Mark the spot where the motor ends when it’s fitted into the pipe and mark where the button should be. Mark 4 spots for push button legs and drill them so the legs fit in nicely.
3. Heat up your soldering iron and solder the wires together. For the long wire that connects to a battery, I used the one that comes from a computer mouse. Since I have 2 old not working mouses which are with the ball :P
Don’t forget to tighten the long wire to the tube so it won’t go anywhere, for that I used this thingie that get nailed to walls to hold wires nicely.
4. When finished, mount everything into the tube and put some hot glue around the motor so it stays in place. I used black hot glue because it’s stronger and it sets faster.
5. Take the alligator clamps you got and solder them to the ends of wire. Remember the polarity because if you mix them, the motor will spin in a different direction. For me – Green wire is + and orange wire is -.
For my battery I used one from the cordless drill, which is 12v, 2.0 Ah NiMH battery.
Actually, 12v is good enough to make it a portable BBQ air blower. Car battery also works
But to make it spin faster and become stronger, I am using a 220V to 24V converter, which I took out from the same old printer I took the motor from.
6. Simple grinder could be made from sanding paper and a plastic gear that comes with some electronic toys. Just wrap the sanding paper around, apply little super glue and you have a little grinder – works really well on paper and other not-so-hard objects.
If you want to have a bigger one, to polish ends of a cut wire, then take bigger sanding paper, a small and long screw and find a little, nicely round branch. You will need ~1cm in length. Wrap the paper around it, apply glue to hold it on the wood and put the screw in. Now put that in a chuck (look below) and go grind!
7. For the chuck I used
The motor I used fits perfectly into the chuck and it’s centered perfectly. It won’t get better than this.
You can really use it for anything an actual dremel would do, but this one doesn’t have so much power. Cutting through metal, plastic or wood is not bad and I am using these cutting disks which are really nice.
So another use for it, apart from using as a drill or a cutter, could be as a hand-held fan. I use it on very hot days or when I need to blow some air to the BBQ to make it burn, instead of blowing air myself and getting smoke into my eyes…
The above material works, but I actually used a piece of strong and thin wire and put it into little tube and used that as a shaft. Drill a hole through them and put wire in to hold it in place.
And that is it. Put it into the drill, connect to the cordless drill battery and you have a fan :D
I guess these propellers would work just as great, but I haven’t tried them.
Here’s a little video to show you how it works: