New Tools for the Shop

I've been buying tools you want to see welcome back to cloud 42 I'm James I have been extremely busy lately between the time that I spend at the gym my day job and other projects that I've picked up around the house I have not had as much time in the shop as I would like however I have picked up a few tools in preparation for some future projects and I thought maybe we take a look at some of those today but before I get to that let me give you an update on my weight loss this is something that a number of you have been asking about in the comments and it has been a while since I've given you an update for those of you who are new to the channel I have not always looked the way I look today 14 months ago I weighed 265 pounds and was almost completely sedentary if you look back at some of my older videos you will see that the difference is really dramatic if you're interested in how I lost the weight I did a video on that there's a link up here and you can go check that out now I started from around 265 pounds I lost about 80 pounds got down to about 185 and at that point I switched over from primarily cardio focus t25 a strength training I've been making a lot of progress and really enjoying that I did intentionally gain about 10 pounds just as I put on muscle mass as I've gained strength and I feel pretty good about where I am right now for those of you who are keeping score I did just test my lifts last week and I squatted 315 pounds bench 225 and dead lifted 395 I really wanted 405 on the deadlift but there was just no way that was gonna happen on the day now those are not world-class numbers but I'm pretty happy with them especially considering I've been doing this less than a year and I started in my late 40s so I really couldn't be happier and at this point I just could not imagine going back to the way I looked before or more importantly the way I felt before I think that's all that I have to say about that if you have any questions comment section down below let's go take a look at some tools this little device is sold as a transistor tester and there are lots and lots of variants of this it's commonly referred to as a Mega 328 transistor tester and these are sold all over a Bay and Amazon often they're sold as bare boards or bare boards with an acrylic case or they come in a lot of different form factors and what it is is a device with some test pins here and a microcontroller and a little bit of support circuitry inside and some very clever firmware that can identify and measure the characteristics of components that are plugged into this socket so for example let me grab something that I know what it is this is a little 2n 4403 PNP transistor plug that into the first three pins of the socket hit the test button and it'll probe all the pins with pattern of test signals and ultimately determine what it thinks this thing is and this says it's a bipolar Junction transistor PNP it shows the symbol on the pin out and it has some measurements like the HFE of 254 I haven't pulled the datasheet on this I would not trust the HFE measurement or any of this stuff with very much detail if I really cared I would look it up check a datasheet or use something more accurate but in terms of just identifying the components this is an amazing little device now I chose this one these are these can be obtained really inexpensively especially if you get the bare PC board versions of them off of ollie Express or off of ebay but I opted for one that has a case on it and paid a little bit more just because I like the form factor I can throw this in a bag I can throw this on a shelf I don't have to worry about it getting damaged because it's got a nice little case on it and that was worth few extra dollars for me let's try a couple of extra couple of additional components here this is an unknown terminal device that I just pulled off of a PC board I'm sure you saw this in a recent video this is hey Cody soldering gun and I picked it up specifically for doing through whole board repairs but since I picked it up I have been ripping components out of every old scrap PC board that I had laying around that I was saving you know in case I wanted to reclaim components so I've got boxes and boxes and boxes of components like this and that's one of the reasons why I picked this up because it provides an easy way to identify quickly kind of what I'm dealing with now once I have things sorted and I'm looking for a transistor or something for a particular application I'll do more careful research but in terms of quickly sorting out what I have this is ideal so I've got this little three terminal device don't know exactly what it is hit the test button and we'll see now the first time it boots up you get this additional screen it takes a little bit longer okay so this says this is a PNP bipolar Junction transistor with an H a Fe of 50 so it's a lower gain which is what you'd expect from a powered device let's try something else let's try this I have no idea what this is I'm assuming it's a very large power MOSFET stick that in here you can see it tests much more quickly if it's already up and this says it is a big power MOSFET then an e mas and it's got capacitance of the gate it's got voltage information and it's got the pin out one two three gate source drain let's take a look at a passive component this is a capacitor this is one of the capacitors that I pulled out of that DMX amplifier that I repaired a couple videos back let's drop this in here and this probably provided me with the biggest surprise of anything I expected it to identify it as a capacitor there should be about two hundred microfarads and it's identified it as a capacitor two hundred eight point seven micro farad's gives a little symbol and this is the thing is surprised me the most it actually measured the ESR and it's measured the ESR of this at 1.8 ohms I had no idea this would measure capacitor ESR now this isn't any good for measuring in circuit but that's impressive I had no idea could do that so that was a pleasant surprise let's grab something else here here's another three terminal device not sure what it is probably some kind of power transistor and it is another handy Moss see you don't have anything else let's try this this is a large inductor large power inductor from a power supply let's see if it has any luck identifying that and yes its measured at 0.2 militant Riis so 200 micro henries no idea we'll have to measure that with something more accurate and find out but actually I'm impressed that it actually identified this as an inductor and not just a resistor so I think that's enough that's you kind of get an idea what this thing does I've been actually quite impressed with it this little ZIF socket can pull out and you can just plug into the socket here directly if you like or you can use the ZIF the ZIF socket is kind of it's kind of wobbly so you kind of have to hang on to it but for the price and if I just got a big pile of components to sort which I do I'm been really impressed with this and DMX amplifier repair video I made a comment that I couldn't measure the ESR of capacitor because I didn't own an LCR meter because LCR meters cost money and that's true they do but I decided that I wanted one so I went ahead and picked one up this is I don't even know how you're supposed to pronounce this Dury a de ree LCR meter this is the de 5000 this is a japanese-made product and this is in the kind of hundred dollar price range and for that price range what you get with this is impressive now I have used more expensive LCR meters we have one at work that costs upwards of $10,000 it's a very nice lab grade instrument and if I had to take you know sort of lab grade measurements I would definitely be interested in something like that but for something in the home shop I have found this to be more than adequate so what an LCR meter is is it has a set of bridges inside and it ultimately sends an AC signal an AC current through a component and then measures the complex reactance of that component in order to measure the capacitance or the inductance and your typical voltmeter is going to have a capacitance measurement but it's going to be very limited you can't control the frequency it's going to have very limited range of very limited accuracy whereas this is a purpose-built device just for taking those kinds of measurements now this is actually a four wire Kelvin connection so there's a little slot here for the positive lead of your component and a slot here for the negative lead of your component in this case I've got an electrolytic capacitor I'll just go ahead and press this in here and let it measure it and what's going on in here is there are two separate wipers that are pinching the wire and they are connected separately inside the meter so one of the wipers is actually applying the AC voltage that produces the current through the component and the other wiper is the measurement point and so this avoids having any current going through the measurement wire and so you get a much more accurate measurement and so in this case it has automatically adjusted and it's measuring this at 219 micro farad's however it's measuring it at one kilohertz I want to change that so this is one kilohertz 10 kilohertz 100 kilohertz 100 Hertz and a hundred and twenty Hertz and those are the options that you have available so this is a capacitor a low ESR capacitor that's meant for use in a power supply it's gonna be filtering here in North America at a hundred and twenty Hertz if you were on fifty Hertz power it would be a hundred but this is the most accurate measurement for me because this is the way this component will be used so it's measuring 225 micro farad's and is automatically switched to series capacitance measurement well I can switch that automatically or I can switch it manually and tell it how what I want it to measure so I will switch it into the manual series capacitance mode and then I can switch and because I have it not auto-ranging I can then measure some other parameters and I'll switch because I want to measure the ESR so in this case it's measuring the ESR of this this capacitor at point one ohms and this is the one of the replacement capacitors from the DMX amplifier repair and so I thought it would be interesting to take a look at okay this is what a new one's supposed to look like a tenth of an ohm what did the ones I pulled out actually looked like so let's take this out grab one of these this is a typical one and you can see it's measuring about two ohms so two ohms is very very high for a power supply capacitor but this is by far not the worst this is one of the ones that was working there are some others that are far worse and grab another one here this is the one that had actually failed and you can see it's measuring much lower capacitance it should be over 200 it's measuring 124 micro farad and you can see the series resistance esrs measuring 228 ohms 0.2 - in this case - - 7.2 - 6 K so this capacitor has just completely failed I didn't have the ability to measure this when I was actually running this on the board just because I didn't own an ESR meter yet I do now you can see that capacitors very badly failed now this this ESR meter came with some other components here it came with a set of alligator leads now these are also four wire Kelvin connections the blades go into the into these slots here and make contact on both sides there are actually two conductors in each one of these wires right down to the clip now a $10,000 ESR meter is going to have insulated clips so one wire connects to one blade and the other wire connects to the other so the connections made right at the component this isn't quite that good but the leads are really short and so it shouldn't matter there's also a guard here so we have guard and these are insulated terminals which will make the which will help avoid interference so I'll put this on here and measure an inductor this is just a small power inductor that I grabbed off of a board so we'll measure that again at 120 Hertz and put it back in auto mode and it's identified this as a 226 micro Henry inductor now incidentally I did measure this inductor on the expensive LCR meter at work and guess what it was 226 micro henries so I've been pretty impressed with the accuracy of this the other thing that this came with is a set of surface mount tweezers so again this is just another device another set of leads with the same Kelvin connections the snap into the meter and then this is a Kelvin tweezer where the four wires come down two of them connect to one tip and two of them connect to the other so that I can take measurements of components on a PC board so this is one of the boards for my electronic lead screw and there is a 4.7 micro farad filter capacitor here and I can just reach down and pinch that and measure so this is measuring 5 just over 5 5.1 micro farad's and that's really what you would expect I haven't measured one out of circuit it's four point seven but it's not a high tolerance device it may actually be that high but I'm also picking up the other pastin see in the circuit I've got power planes on top ground planes on the bottom so there's definitely some capacitance from the board but there that also may just be the capacitance and the chip capacitance on the input of the voltage regulator in circuit there's other things interfering with that let's try a couple of other components on here there's a 1k resistor right here it's a very small one it's no 603 and there we are one point zero zero to eight K there's a 10k resistor over here let me grab it 9.2 K let me grab another one of them in here these are 5% resistors so 9.1 K not bad and again there's other stuff in circuit here that's gonna be affecting that so that's an example of how the tweezers work and I've been pretty impressed and for a hundred just over a hundred bucks you can't beat this there are some other units in the 3 to 400 dollar price range they look pretty good but for my use this is great and it's got lots of other features I haven't even looked at but just in terms of identifying components and measuring them I've been very very pleased with this if you've been watching my series on the electronic lead screw then you'll recognize this board this is the interface board that goes from the microcontroller out to the stepper servo driver and the display and for the display I'm using a 5 pin right angle header and to connect to this header I'm using what's called a DuPont connector this is a crimp connector with five pins in it and each of the wires is crimped onto a terminal inside and then these just snap right on to the header now this is really handy these are very secure because they're crimped they're very vibration resistant so this is kind of an ideal solution for this application but you have to have a special tool to crimp the pins on to the wires and this is what I've been using to date this is a really in expensive crimp tool this came from RadioShack back in the day and it just got stamped jaws if I can get this in focus it's just got stamped jaws for a couple of different sizes of terminals and this works if you're just gonna do a few and this has served me well for many years just doing a few but especially if you start having to do more than just a couple or if you're concerned about the quality of the connections you're much better off with a ratcheting crimp tool so I decided to go ahead and pick one up now you can spend anything you want on ratcheting crimp tools but I was looking for something true to form that was inexpensive and good enough for my use and this is what I found this is actually a set that I picked up off of Amazon with a ratcheting crimp tool useless manual and a couple sets of different kinds of connectors so let's start with with the tool you know looking at the jaws on this overall this is a crimp tool so it's got a ratchet it goes all the way down and it won't open again until it's completely closed and that ensures that you have a quality crimp there's another thing that that does is it allows you to Ratchet it down until it's holding the terminal in the jaws and it won't fall out while you're working with the with the RadioShack tool I had to do that by hand I had to squeeze down and be very very careful bracing it with my thumb to hold it in place while I found the wire and fit it into the tool and more often than not I would slip and it would pop out with the ratchet you can just bring that down and it'll stay in place I'll do a demo of that here in a minute looking at the jaws I'm actually pretty pleased with what I see here I really wasn't sure what to expect on a tool in this price range let's see what did I pay for the whole thing I think I paid $40 for the tool and all of the crimp connections which we'll take a look at these look to me like they're wire EDM or at least ground they're not stamped like the a Shack tool and from what I've used it so far I've been pretty impressed with the quality of crimped it makes let's do one so this came with a couple of different boxes of different assortment assortments these are jst xh connectors if you've done anything with lithium polymer batteries on radio control cars or airplanes you'll recognize these these are the connectors that are typically used for the balancing connectors we're not going to worry about those but I'm interested in are the DuPont connectors and this is a pretty good assortment it's got some rows of header pins and it's got a bunch of housings with different numbers of pins here are the five pin headers like you saw on that cable assembly and it goes all the way down to four three two and even single pin headers as well so we'll just grab one of those and let me grab a pin pins come in strips so I will just cut one off so this is what the pins look like individually they've got the little teeth on them and I will go ahead and place one in the tool and run it into the first click and so now it's hard to see that but the terminal is captured right here in the jaws and it will not fall out so I don't have to worry about that I can prep my wire you don't need to take much off the end just a tiny bit of insulation and that should be plenty for a DuPont crimp and then we just slide this in and there we have it one terminal crimped securely on the end and you can see the insulation is crimped as two fingers around the insulation and then the bare part of the wire is crimped in the terminal itself and then that is ready to go right into a housing I just snap right in and then we have a DuPont terminal connection so you can spend a lot of money on these you can easily spend $300 on a good crimper and this is certainly not that class of crimper this is you know a $20 crimper with a couple of $10 sort Minh sub connectors but for my use I'm pretty happy with it I I can't complain gets the job done without spending a ton of money when I did the videos showing the VFD upgrade on my lathe I also showed how to wire up the electrical box and there were a lot of components in it like this with screw terminals for wire connections and the way this works is you stick the wire in and you turn the screw to crimp it down and when I made those connections I just took the wire stripped it and then stuck the stripped wire into the terminal and tighten the screw and this of course works and it makes a secure connection the problem is that you're dealing with a bunch of individual strands of wire and these can very easily fray and end up freeing out the side so when you think you're sticking it in here you're actually peeling off a you know a strand of copper like this that's now sticking out the side and is a hazard of shorting on adjacent terminals and so I got a bunch of comments on the video saying that I really should be using Ferrell's for these so I decided to go ahead and get the tools so I can do that properly so I did a bunch of research and this is what I came up with this is an inexpensive ferrule crimp tool and a set of Ferrell's available I picked these up on Amazon for less than $25 and I was really impressed when I got this and was looking at the crimp I've used crimp Ferrell's before that just had a pin with a normal crimp on the back like an insulated terminal crimp like you'd see for automotive applications but this is different as I close this take a look at how these jaws come together there's actually they're circular and they crimp down from four different sides so there's a cam a this squeezes the ferrule all the way around down on the wire so let's put one of these on and let me show you how this works so I will once again strip the end of my wire and so there's the stranded end and then I need to figure out the smallest ferrule that this will fit into okay I think that's about it the wires just barely fit into that if I take the next size smaller oh yeah they will go in just one size smaller get a straight wire here okay so I'll take the blue one here and just very carefully fit all the strands down into there and then just take the crimp tool and crimp it on slide that all the way in all the way down till it latches and that is the result get a nice solid a nice solid crimp connection this is not coming off at all the wires are squeezed tightly in it and you can see the texture around the side where the serrated jaws have crushed this down so then we take the wire once we've got the ferrule on it and it will just go directly into the terminal here and secure with the screw just as normal but with this kind of setup now we've run no risk of stray wires shorting out connections and we can also connect and disconnect and reconnect this over and over and over again without any risk to the wire because these are not going to get bent up they're not going to get dislodged we're not going to break off individual conductors we have a nice solid package and then the same thing also works on much much smaller wires like control wires do one of those here with a much smaller ferrule and the very same tool works to put tiny wires into little tiny Farrell's and again same thing those same things will drop right into the connectors and secure down just like their big brothers so every box I do from now on I'm gonna do these I really like them because they're nice and neat the wires don't fray and they're much easier to manage so 25 bucks I thought that was a steal the last tool that I want to show you today is this industrial label maker this is a DiMeo rhino 4200 and I've had a label maker that I've used for years I've had one of these dime electro tags but it uses half-inch tape and that's the largest that it supports and while you can get two lines of text on it it ends up being so small that it's barely usable and what I wanted to do is label my electronics drawers like these with information about the components that are in it and 3/4 inch wide label with three lines of text is just perfect for that and that's something that this label maker does easily so it uses several different sizes and types of materials the one that I use the most is this 3/4 inch nylon and that turns out to be perfect for labeling drawers like this but that's not the main reason why I bought this the main reason why I bought this is for labor labeling wires and cables so for example this crimp connector that we just made to go into a din terminal block when you get a whole bunch of these in a box it's hard to keep track of where things are and I wanted to be able to label the individual wires and this label maker does that easily so I'll power it on here and it wants to know the width of the label that I just put in it I put in 3/4 of an inch and I'd say I want to label this that's fine phase phase one so this is the label and I will say that I want to do a wire and cable label and I'll want to know what size wire I'm using so you can set this for Kate for cat5 cable you can set it for coax instead of for big stuff I'm gonna set it for a wg3 plus because this is 12 AWG wire okay and then print and what this does is it prints a small label with the text across the label printed several times and so then what you can do with this once I peel off the backing so you can just wrap this around the wire and once you have that wrapped around the wire you have a nice neat little label that's right on the wire that has the writing clearly legible so that if I stick this in the terminal block the writing is very clearly legible and if I've got this whole thing full of wires I can very easily see what each one is it'll also do flag labels and swap out for some half-inch material tell it that it's half-inch and say that I want to do a flag and flag and then it wants to know the flag length and I'll just say let's just do a three quarter inch flag okay and print and then that prints a label that's designed to be folded in half and wrapped around the wire I'll see if I can make these match up and then you get a nice little flag that wraps around the wire and this material is set up so that it absolutely will not peel apart once it's on there it's permanent these are very very durable but these are not the only tricks that this has it'll also print on heat shrink material so these are three different sizes of heat shrink tubing we've got quarter inch 3/8 and 1/2 inch heat shrink tubing and this will actually print directly on it so if I pull this out drop in another wire here drop in this cartridge tell it that this is 3/8 inch material and then I can just do a standard label that's set to size of 324 point we go a little bit smaller let's go 12 and print and this has now produced a piece of heat shrink tubing with text printed on it so I can take this little piece of heat shrink tubing slip it around a wire and shrink it on and that gives us a very nice very neat very solid and durable label so that gives us three options we can make a label that wraps around a wire which is really handy if the wire already has a connector on the end we can do a flag that we just tape on which is handy for bigger cables or places where you need larger text and we have the ultra durable heat shrink tubing that you can just slip around the wire now of course you can only do this when there's no connector on the end or if you're using a size of tubing that will fit over the connector but all in all I am very happy with this label maker and this is going to make my electrical box installations a lot neater and a lot easier to maintain long term this video has been a little different from what I normally do on this channel did you like it you're still here hopefully we'll get back to some regular project videos soon but in the meantime if you enjoyed this video please give me a thumbs up feel free to subscribe to the channel and leave me a comment I'd like to know what you think thank you for watching you [Music]

Channel: Clough42

Views: 37,728

Keywords: Tools, Transistor Tester, Mega 328, LCR Meter, DER EE, DE-5000, Dymo, Rhino 4200, Dupont Crimper, Ferrule Crimper, Heat Gun, Heat Shrink, Label Maker, Wire Labels, Cable Labels

Id: 99FeHF-uM90

Length: 34min 19sec (2059 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2019