NUTR: Ultrasonic Cutter USW-334

[Music] son of congratulations on purchasing ham sandwich from the sorry your purchase of technology from the year know anyone remember this thing remember back when I tried to turn an ultrasonic cleaner into an ultrasonic cutter well then North remember I wouldn't call it a rousing success but it did do something more than just an exacto knife on its own not a lot admittedly but some granted it's hard to convey feel via video but there were a couple of instances of the knife moving through rubber or cardboard I think quite easily something appeared to be happening at any rate if I'm not mistaken this horn and blade were driven with a 60-watt 40 kilohertz transducer out of the ultrasonic cleaner maybe it was 40 Watts I don't quite recall whatever it was the whole thing was bigger than what might contrib Leif it in a handheld ultrasonic cutter which is what this would have become and it worked a bit better anyway since publishing that video in addition to the usual single men in my area I've been getting a lot of targeted ads for commercial ultrasonic cutters and this one in particular or this variant kept popping up this is the us w3 34 and to be frank the rest is pretty much all Greek to me I think that's Greek anyway fortunately the specs are in science it's 40 kilohertz again I think mine was at 16 20 Watts about a third of the power we were running at and probably a fifth of the power of what you'd need to actually do some fun stuff with an ultrasonic cutter but I'll abstain from judgement until I've had a chance to play with it let's see if Google Translate can't make heads or tails of what this box is trying to tell us bear with me just a moment here Galatian Georgian German Greek there it is - English of course I want to download for offline use all right I think we got something here immediately after opening package you are hereby bound by international treaty to cut CDs polystyrene and the quarters off of stacks of paper unfortunately I don't have any polystyrene sheets handy I do have a stack of paper I just wrote polystyrene on each and every one of these all right it's not bad at making confetti I have to give it that so these things I think are made of polycarbonate though this one in particular is made of pure Hellfire okay fine maybe he'll smoke the two of you out there that think this is sacrilege the CD hasn't worked in 15 or 20 years and it's kind of melty on polycarbonate this isn't a hot knife by the way I mean there's certainly heat developed at the cutting edge I'm sure we can all relate to how tedious it is removing a track we don't like from a CD with a regular exacto knife this was a walk in the park in the comments of my ultrasonic cutter video a lot of people suggested I could have simply used one of those oscillating multi tools like that one in your garage he thought was gonna do it all but you've only used it twice counting the first time you just turned it on to see what it sounded like and of course to find out if it had cut your finger while in theory those multi tools and these cutters fundamentally do the same thing vibrate a blade so you don't have to do the cutting yourself these are literally two orders of magnitude more vibrating I don't know what the specs are these days for those multi tools but they're mechanically driven so maybe they're ten twenty thirty thousand strokes per minute not sure let's say 30 K to make the math easy thirty thousand strokes per minute works out to about five hundred strokes per second it's likely less 400 or 300 this is 40,000 granted this particular model doesn't have the same power that your average multi-tool might but the cutting action here is much more at a no microscopic for lack of a better word the cutting effect is different and especially I think more material dependent anyway let's see what you get Deeley suited for coronating seahorses nice first things first it is a lot lighter than it looks honestly both these parts feel empty hollow plastic but it's more or less like a soldering station reverse-thread on that thing I guess that's to keep the holder from loosening when you put the cutter back and it comes with some spares it's like additional blades a tool and some other really small hardware set screws that sort of thing and just an on and off switch no power just though I guess that makes sense for a low-power ultrasonic cutter I resisted the urge to buy this but something in me kept wondering how they got it so small now frankly I'm wondering why it's so light and you know how they worked not how they work I think I got a sense of that I mean how well they work and well I guess I finally broke down and bought one you won this round Google all kidding aside I have justified this as a gift for the wife I'll have you know she's quite the crafty woman arts and crafty the sort of materials she uses if this still works when we get it back together I think she'll love it added bonus since it's a gift I can't be legally forced to disclose how much I spent relying on my mind-boggling powers of deductive reasoning I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that the power supply and Driver are in here the power and the smarts basically according to the box this does some sort of feedback to keep the blade in resonance and the transducer is probably in here you know as opposed to the other way around before I break this down though let's put it through its paces try it on some stuff give me just a moment to collect some material from around the garage here and we'll see what 20 watts can do here's what I've managed to scrounge together the last time we started with cardboard and rubber so I got that same stuff out two pieces of rubber this stuff's a little harder not much but a little more firm than this drawer liner stuff got a piece of felt just because I found some around a piece of leather I've got a wooden dowel this is I don't know what beech or birch or something maybe hot glue stick this could be a lot of things but these cheap ones are usually e VA not to be confused with a ve e VA is something something or more precisely something vinyl something depending on how much of that something something is in there evie a can manifests itself is anything from hot glue to flip-flops or pool noodles I've got a cap from a small water bottle this is almost certainly polypropylene there's no markings in it but I think caps are almost always polypropylene I grabbed a cut off of this stuff I thought it was acrylic but I think it's actually polycarbonate since we already did the CD I won't try that one this is PVC that's Teflon this is one half of my neighbor's remote control it's a BS I know that because these sort of things are almost always made of ABS that and it says ABS right there unless that's trying to tell them you have nice abs and I have one of those containers they send you tools and such in I don't remember what I bought by the looks of it it was probably a small drill or an mill this I believe is HDPE it could be polypropylene again it's not marked but this appears to be blow molded which likely makes it HDPE like a milk jug or a gas can I suppose it could be any of a dozen plastics but HDPE is my guest for now I think that's a hold on there's this CD case this almost certainly is polystyrene let's give them a try first up the cardboard all right it's cutting that like butter to try the drawer liner stuff yep just like I remember it feeling before here's the slightly harder stuff that is somewhat vindicating I'm gonna skip the felt in the leather I don't know if I'll do that well against that let's jump to polypropylene so that feels like I'd expect it to feel and that feels like a hot knife there's definitely a difference you do still have to push the blade a bit to get it cutting but once it's in there it really starts trucking here's the wood dowel sure everyone knows what that feels like interesting it is burning the wood again that's not a hot knife not to mention it's not like a hot knife melt its way through wood this is hot glue because why not that's quite a difference PVC just a warning on PVC if you screw around with this stuff you do not want to breathe in the fumes it's a little gummy but again feels like a hot knife just polystyrene yeah that's not gonna happen again hot knife abs I don't know where to have at this thing you know of course I had that boss there oh one more what I think is the HDPE tube yeah that is slower sorry if I went out of frame there this is the bottom of that tube I just cut off and not a stick of butter I'm starting to get a feeling that the angle of attack is important yeah all right a few thoughts at this point first my apologies for any chainsaw sounds you may have heard I'll try my best to minimize them but neighbors will be neighbors though I'm starting to think that giant red on the air sign I installed on the house is starting to have ironic effects second I noticed in editing that this cap actually does have info on it an incredibly small number - which makes this HDPE my entire life has been a lie and since these two felt very different under the knife I'm gonna change my answer and go with polypro on the stick of butter although this thing really is something else I mean it does feel like the future's here it's just not enough power for what I think I'd like to do with it I mean don't get me wrong if you do a lot of I don't know model making very detailed work and thin tough materials this thing is probably great don't think my wife will love this though keep in mind she does always end up exchanging the Christmas presents I get her so there's that in a garage shop this might be good if I'm grasping at straws here maybe you cut a lot of custom gaskets for stuff or maybe you're cleaning a lot of flash from plastic parts perhaps you're an avant-garde hot glue stick sculptor I don't know think of it like lasers no one's not going to play with a 5 watt laser even though a 500 watt laser would be better but then again if you're a socially challenged college professor who likes laser pointing at your slides well a 500 watt laser might make a mess of your projector screen ask me how I know I did the math if you're going through 2,000 exacto blades a month well dang this thing pays for itself in well a month look it's like my broke grandpa he said you've got to spend money to save money now let's have at this thing [Applause] dang now why would they do that okay this is a little anticlimactic not in that I was expecting a floating orb of pure sonic power or anything like that but I don't really know what I'm looking at like in terms of sharing life-changing profound insights into what's going on I mean what do I look like I'm made out of atoms or electrons or something hey for what it's worth it looks clean and well put together they did go to the trouble of using a lot of nice colors in there it appears to be all or a lot of analog stuff though probably easy to fix or not that hard to fix should something go wrong alright don't recognize this giant ominous gray block attached under the heatsink which has screws going straight through it can't be that important if they skewered it like that maybe it's just an example to the other components you know like what happens if you're a rat oh they do have something on there too probably check if it's running a fever and there's a fuse might have been nice if that was externally accessible but maybe they don't expect this thing to blow its top all that often I've gone ahead and put this thing back together unfortunately there's not much to see here let's turn our attention to the actual cutter you know I was really hoping for a screw under there dang it this thing snapped together yeah we get this blade out of here before I cut myself do not use the blade with a hole they give me a blade with a hole how mean would that be if they did so I've been having at this thing without much luck it doesn't want to open up that crackling is not a good sign or sound I'm thinking this thing is either bonded or ultrasonically welded both of which mean we're not getting into this without permanent destruction kind of funny I don't know how many of you follow the news all of the recent right repair legislation they're talking about for 2019 it scuzzy this kind of stuff and again I hear that crackling that sounds like weld breaking or adhesive giving up the ghost I really wanted to get a look at what that transducer and horn I guess maybe look like in here I'm in an impasse crossroads the plastic components welded like this could make up some important part of the structure that makes this thing work if I cut it or crack it or break it to get a look at the inside I mean I'm not worried about it being ugly when it goes back together I'm worried about it not working when it goes back together odds of that are pretty slim but I might hand this off to my wife see how she feels about it if she doesn't particularly like it or doesn't use it much maybe we'll bring this back and run her once under the bandsaw it's unfortunate I mean there can be legit reasons for welding parts together like this I can't imagine they're making a million of these units a year where they're trying to save cost on a fastener or two maybe there's intellectual property in here they don't want people easily getting it though if I bought this trying to compete in the cutthroat world of ultrasonics I likely wouldn't have any qualms breaking into this thing well it still works not that we really did anything to it see what it does to ceramic something very brittle it's an old TIG nozzle nothing at all no one's the boss of me except maybe my boss my manager and most times my wife so I was going to end the video right there would have been a bit of a letdown I realized that sometimes that's just how these things shake out in editing though the squishy crackly sounds we heard when I was flexing the housing they started to bother me I mean even a terrible ultrasonic Wheldon be that bad long story short it uses seven or eight of these perimeter snaps like these blind snaps like the back your cell phone might have and a few drops of what looks like CA glue in strategic locations I saw the first one in through the back I was able to pry the back open a little bit and saw that first snap when I realized what was going on I could squeeze the bottom half and a vise just a little and work my way around with some pics so more or less what you might expect the phone jack where the phone calls come in small PCB with an LED lets you know you got messages and the transducer piezo stack the counter mass I guess and the horn up at the front it's anchored in the middle with this rubber gasket sort of thing I'm not sure what this washer does maybe it's just a shim to get a good tight fit in the plastic housing some viewers in my old video commented that I should have tried that and it does make sense it seems to me like you'd lose half of the amplitude right when this stack grew and contracted after that would happen at the front or some percentage of that would happen at the front and the rest would happen at the back as opposed to mounting it on the end where you drive that length change all to the business end well you know it's hard to argue with something that works soul button is pretty cheesy I'd expect that to probably be the first thing to break [Music] [Applause] don't know about you but I thought that was pretty cool to see it's interesting to me how much smaller the transducer wasn't here compared to this thing that was 20 verse 60 watts I guess that stack could be three times bigger again this appeared to do something just now I'm seeing it wasn't very efficient to put it nicely or maybe this has better smarts in it some of that feedback to maintain resonance I don't know but what I do know is this whole exercise is giving me a little bit of a kick in the butt to maybe try this again I might do some more digging into the control circuit side of things after all that stuff didn't look all that complicated see if I can't work towards a bigger badder version 2.0 the mechanics of what's going on these things is just so interesting to me and I just love how silent this thing is thanks for watching

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 1,421,708

Rating: 4.8707232 out of 5

Keywords: ultrasonics, ultrasonic cutter, USW-334

Id: FA46h7Db1BY

Length: 20min 32sec (1232 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/SpartanII117]

I laughed so hard when I saw this video today.

[u/scratchisthebest]

Tony slab

[u/yourfaceilikethat]

Saw this right after watching Cody's latest video. I thought thought it was a nice shout out