Print PDF
Favorite
Email
This is a reply of "make your 'helping hands' 100x more useful for soldering / gluing small parts". I took the improvements that leevonk made and made some of my own including adding heat shrink to the end of all of the screws and inside the hands to improve them so that they did not either spin, come out, or crush.
My largest contribution to this is instead of having the holder that had formerly held the magnifying glass on the left side of the middle instead of on the same side as the other hand. This makes it so you can move them easily further apart. To make the hands really close just move the middle holder of the bar all the way to the right and move the left hand all the way to the right as well. This makes it much easier to hold about anything.
My largest contribution to this is instead of having the holder that had formerly held the magnifying glass on the left side of the middle instead of on the same side as the other hand. This makes it so you can move them easily further apart. To make the hands really close just move the middle holder of the bar all the way to the right and move the left hand all the way to the right as well. This makes it much easier to hold about anything.
Improvements to the helping hands units I've made are adding washers to the flimsy ball socket plates. Before I did that mine used to always bend. Then one of my helping hands had ferrules up inside the alligator clips to keep them from being crushed. The other didn't. So I made my own out of of nail shanks I put up inside them, then sawed flush. I just measured them and they're 0.136 diameter which makes them 12d box nails.
That is all the pimping I've done on my helping hands. They serve me now.
My ex-boss when I assembled electronics was a huge fan of Popsicle sticks. He confided in me once that he could make any jig, or fixture out of them. So I hate to rain on your parade but that is the competition you have to face from your potential customer base too.
As a funny aside his machine of choice working with Popsicle sticks was invariably our bench grinder. Man that wheel was so loaded down with wood. The guy was an idiot, but hey he owned the company. Unconsciously he taught me a lot obliquely too. But I am an astute student of my fellow man.
I can learn things from people that they do not know themselves!