Solder Pen!

please don't snap off please don't snap off please don't snap off hello internet my name is quinton and this is blondiax silver solder comes in these super maddening coils that are tightly wound and impossible to straighten out and make it very difficult to get the silver solder precisely where you need without sticking your hand in the way of oxyacetylene or propane or other angry forms of fire so to address this problem i've made what i call the solder pen this is kind of like a mechanical pencil but for silver solder and it's a great afternoon mini lathe project or if your lathe is bigger that's okay too so let's go let me start with a demonstration of the problem that i'm trying to solve so here i'm silver soldering a model boiler project this is another series that some of you may be watching and you can see me struggling as i try to apply a little additional solder there to a joint that needs some i'm having to hold the coil at a weird angle because it's very springy and then i try to straighten it and i can't really get it straight and you know i had a little better luck holding it with pliers but still this is all just very awkward at a moment when you really need things to not be awkward because there's a giant fire of death in your other hand here's the tool that i designed to hopefully help with this it's a hollow brass tube and there's two ends threaded in one for 132nd solder and one for 1 16 solder coils and then there's a tensioning knob that goes in the side i wasn't sure if that was necessary so i'm going to try building this without it to see how it goes the stockpile supplied me with these lovely two pieces of brass for this project i've got a chunk of round bar here that i'll cut off a little extra long for the main body of the tool and then i'll cut off a smaller chunk of this hex bar stock that i'll use for the two ends just enough to make the ends and have something to hold onto in the chuck there starting with the round bar i'm going to choke it all the way up in the chuck because the first thing i want to do is drill out the center and so i'm going to face off the end as is tradition yeah my tool height's not quite on center there i got a tiny little nubbin on that first pass so i'll just correct that tool height a little bit and then finish cleaning that up now nubbin free we can move on to drilling this out now my intention was to center drill this thoroughly enough that the center drill taper will be left over and then i completely failed at doing that but we'll come back to that and i'll explain why we need a taper there but i'm going to start by drilling this out as far as i can from one end the overall tube is about twice the length of the drill that i have in this size so it's a very high aspect ratio hole which is to say it's extremely deep for the diameter of it and whenever you're doing a hole like this you overwhelm the efficiency of the flutes on the drill the spiral groove on a drill has a maximum rate at which you can evacuate chips so once you get below a certain depth you have to start pulling the drill out more and more frequently so sliding the tail stock back like this is a very quick way to do that now i need to come back in with a larger center drill and get my taper back that i lost this doesn't work super well because you don't have the pilot anymore but if you're careful you can kind of get away with doing this you'll see why that taper is necessary in a moment but in the meantime i'm going to mark the depth of my tap here just approximate is good enough for this we need to tap some threads in there that are more than deep enough for the caps that are going to go in there and then i bring in my spring-loaded tap follower and tap out that hole eagle-eyed viewers may notice that that hole just shrunk and you're not imagining things this is the drill that you saw earlier doesn't fit how did i do that i made the part again because i drilled it the clearance drill size instead of the tapping drill size all the way through the tube whoops luckily an easy part to remake but there's no shame in making a mistake like that when you're a beginner especially just make the part again pulling the stock out now and squaring up the tool post so i can turn the od and for this i'm going to need tail support so now you see why i needed a little bit of a taper around the thread there just so the tail stock has something to hold onto and i can turn down the od this is primarily to clean it up the diameter here is not super critical i decided to go for a diameter equal to the distance across the vertices of the hex bar stock that i have so that when the caps are screwed on it'll kind of look nice so that's what i did i'm checking the diameter in three places not because it matters but anytime you turn long stock it's a good opportunity to keep an eye on the taper in your lathe and see if anything needs a lining now in with the parting blade and part off to the desired length this little stub can go back on the stockpile we won't need it or will we now put the body back in the other way with some aluminum shim stock there to protect it it's actually slices of aluminum can works great for this and we're going to drill out from the other side to finish the central tube now of course when you flip something in a three-jaw chuck you lose your concentricity so i'm introducing about five thou of error doing this but this is just a big hollow tube and it doesn't matter if this was something critical like a bushing for an axle or something then you would need to use a four jaw to flip it around and indicate in the existing bore somehow but not a problem here tube drilled all the way through and the other end tapped now i can pull it back out again and i'm gonna put the knurling tool in here and i'm going to put a bit of a knurl in the center area there just to give you something to grip while you're unthreading and threading the ends there especially if you're holding gloves this might be helpful so i start by clamping it down just tight enough that the wheels are spinning and then i put lots of fluid on there and then i proceed to crank it down and then i engage the power feed very very slowly now i'm not the greatest at knurling so don't necessarily take my advice but that turned out okay there's a little bit of double tracking there so it's not perfect but it's certainly sufficient for this there's the body complete now and i can move on to making the ends it's looking pretty good so far in with the hex bar stock now i'm gonna find the zero on my chuck here and i'm gonna mark that side of the stock and that's because i actually thought i was gonna do these ends in two different setups and the great thing about hex bar in a three jaw chuck is that it will hold its concentricity quite well if you put the same side on the same jaw when you re-chuck it however i didn't end up doing that but i thought i'd show you that anyway it's a good trick for working with hex bar stock it's self-indexing in that way in with the center drill now and that's not just for the drilling that's also creating the cone that you see there in the part in the upper right so you want to go in more than you would normally do with that center drill next i'm going to go in part way with an oversized drill this is quite a bit larger than the 132nd final hole that we want and this is going to save me a lot of work because i'm reducing the aspect ratio of that tiny hole so here's the drill we need for the tiny part this is one thirty second or it's a little bit bigger than that and i don't wanna have to drill this hole all the way through because this would be a very tricky hole if i need to make it as deep as the entire length of the coned part there so i've left myself a hundred thou at the end of the cone there and i'm carefully feeding the drill in until i feel a touch and then i'm setting up an indicator on the quill of the tail stock here so i know how deep to go i need to preload this all the way up to the depth that i want because of course the quill is moving away from the indicator in this case and then i can get some wd-40 in there and start drilling now the trick here is that my lathe is not running nearly fast enough for a drill this small my lathe tops out at about 900 rpm without moving the belt but i can get away with this as long as you're very very careful with the feed just feed in a little bit pull out clear chips very very frequently gentle feed and then clear chips extremely frequently i'm only going in about 20 thou at a time and then clearing chips and you can get away with running it too slow if i was going to make a whole bunch of these parts then i would go to the trouble of moving the belt to get the lathe running as fast as possible now i can turn the od for the thread there and if i eyeballed this right the taper there should end up pretty close to the od there as shown on the cad drawing that cone is there to ease the transition of the silver solder into the tip as you're sliding it through the tube i'll deburr that and then i can come in with the tail stock die holder the nice thing about brass especially with a fine pitch thread is that it's very easy to cut the threads so i don't even need the tommy bar here on the die holder i can just hold it by hand and run that down and it's always nice to put a generous chamfer on the back of a thread that makes it easier to thread that thing in and out especially with something like these ends which are going to be threaded and unthreaded very frequently while using this tool now i'm going to come back in with my parting tool and i'm going to undercut the base of that thread a little bit and that's to make sure that the ends seat down nicely on the tube as you can see there it doesn't quite seat anytime you turn a shoulder and cut threads on it like that there's always going to be a little bit of a fillet left in that corner so the goal is as you can see here to just kind of clear away that material so that there's no interference and the tube will thread on there now my original plan was then to part this off flip it around and turn the taper but i decided to do this with a form tool instead so i just moved the tool far enough down that i knew i would be well clear of the base of the taper and then because this is brass i can just push this straight in it's very easy cutting in fact this form tool is just my regular turning tool the angle on the back of it there is a pretty decent approximation of what i would like so i just push this in almost all the way through not quite parting the stock off and then i feed the tool to the right until the thickness of the remaining hexagonal portion is about right and then i can finish pushing inward you'd never get away with this in something like steel but brass is super easy to cut so once i'm happy with the depth of that hexagonal portion then i can move in and back a little bit with the two hand wheels to finish off that cut while keeping the hex portion the same thickness and if i did my math right on the drilling then i should now have the tiny hole that we drilled exposed and that looks good now on the second one with the larger hole i didn't quite get it right the drill didn't go deep enough so that was easy to fix i just put the drill in the dremel and punched that all the way through okay let's do some test fitting so i've got the two ends made i'm going to thread them onto the tube and i'll start by test fitting the small solder the 132nd coil there the nice thing about the small stuff is that you can feed it through the larger tip so you can leave both tips installed in this case that feeds through very nicely and we'll try the thick stuff for the thicker stuff of course you do have to remove the smaller end but you can still use the end there for storage when you're done so you don't lose either of the tips that works really well now this tool is not super necessary for the thick coils but you know i was making it anyway thought it might as well it's really only the thin 132nd coils where you can't easily straighten it by hand so that seems to work well seems to be giving me good control so let's actually give it a try so back on to the boiler that i'm soldering and i'm giving this thing a whirl now you can see that i'm still really struggling with it here and it might not be obvious why but i've got the solder pulled all the way out because i still can't quite get it to point the direction that i want you can see me flexing with the length there trying to get a better angle i can't get the solder pointed the way i want and it was frustrating and i figured out why it's because the solder rotates in there from the weight of the coil so you try to line it up the way you want and then the coil flops downward this is bringing me back to the tensioner idea that i had in the original design i thought that knob would be used to hold the silver solder in place longitudinally in the tube but that turned out not to be necessary however i think it will serve to solve this rotation problem so i threw the tube in the mill and centered it up and measured a spot from the end with the edge finder and i pre-drilled this for a small thread and then i tapped this now i used a fine thread here because the wall thickness of this tube is not enormous i managed to get two and a half threads in there which is pushing it you really want three threads minimum in any situation but this will do i think now it's time for that little stub we had left over to shine this will be the perfect size for making that little tensioning knob so i'm going to start with a simple turning to a shoulder operation i'll turn down this diameter here to the major diameter of the thread that i used in the tube for the length of this i just kind of guessed i wanted something that could travel deep enough into the tube to trap the silver solder as needed after putting the thread on that and once again putting a nice chamfer on there to make it pleasant to use i brought in the knurling tool to knurl this little knob that'll make it much easier to use now you got to be very careful knurling this close to the chuck because these knurling tools do have a tendency to wander along the work especially if your tool post isn't super tight and if the hinges and joints and things on the knurling tool are not super tight so do this with caution but that went well got a nice knurl on there now the secret to any really good looking knurl is to chamfer the edges after knurling because the knurling process pushes a lot of material to the sides it's not a cutting operation unless you're using cut neural wheels so it tends to push the material around a lot but a little chamfer on both sides really cleans it up and makes it look nice so with that i can finish parting this off now and gutsy okay there's my adorable little knob i'll say at this point if you're new to lathe work making little brass knobs like this for all the things that you own is a great exercise it's a really quick project that teaches you a lot of basic skills so look for things in your life that have wing nuts or other hand fasteners and replace them with nice brass knobs that you made yourself quick test fit on the tube and it certainly seems to thread in there so well let's see if it actually functions as desired with the silver solder in there i tightened the knob down all the way and that didn't work at all yeah remember how i guessed how long that thread should be well it was too short so i actually took some time and measured it and realized it needed to be about 40 longer than that so i made it again longer this time now tighten it down and that is rock solid that's just perfect so that i think is going to do what i need the resemblance to an airbrush is entirely accidental but this gives me really good control over that squirrely coil of silver solder back onto my boiler project and i can say that this thing is working great it's giving me really good control and get that silver solder in there where i need without getting my hand too close to the heat very happy with how this thing turned out as i said this is a great mini lathe project if you're looking for one and the drawings and 3d models are on my patreon as always and if you'd like to support the channel go ahead and check out that patreon for that as well thank you very much for watching and i will see you next time you

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 72,533

Rating: 4.9450369 out of 5

Keywords: blondihacks, machining, machinist, abom79, this old tony, vintage machinery, steam, electronics, making, maker, hacking, hacker, lathe, mill, woodworking, workshop, shop, model engineering, engineer, engineering, live steam, machine shop, metal lathe, vertical mill, metalworking, metal shop, home improvement, how to, do it yourself (hobby), mini mill, mini lathe, tutorial, soldering iron, tinning a soldering iron tip, silver soldering, boiler soldering, silver soldering copper boiler

Id: cTYXz9IQxDs

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021