Adam Savage's One Day Builds: Portable Soldering Station!

Testim's Adam Savage here in my cave with a new one day build and today's one day build is dedicated to store infrastructure. These are some of my favorite

builds

because I end up living with these

builds

on a daily basis sometimes for years and when you design something right that works for you in such a way that it becomes a joy every time you break it and that's what I hope with finish today. There are also several different types of store infrastructure constructions. that shelf over there, which is true. I've never dealt with that shelf over there. its a tool i have been using regularly on an almost daily basis for decades and i have seen myself using this tool here in the shop enough to conclude i think i need a mobile

station

to stay with my

soldering

iron yes

soldering

it is a key part of the Arsenal from any manufacturer and there are many different options for soldering irons and I've used them for the last 30 or 40 years I've used plug-ins I've used propane I've used Weller and Dremel and they've all been good good I mean I particularly like the pens butane soldering irons because they tend to get hotter they heat up quickly and are pretty reliable for me in my experience but i recently came across my dream soldering iron and it's this little pup my friend zac ratting used this when he worked with me attaching laser tags to Peter Jackson's WWI planes for wild builds and I was like dude what's that? and he says it's a new thing these welders are fantastic first of all they plug into a standard 12 volt plug here you can run them off a lithium ion battery that has this plug but I have a preference on that and it's it's about how stores use batteries like i can buy a bunch of different types of lath and my own batteries of different form factors and use them to power things and that's ok i have a bunch of these i'm going to find the charger and put it i plug in and go find the charger and plug it in it becomes this all the extra infrastructure i find a bit tedious so whenever i can i prefer to use the batteries i already have at the store the batteries for my cordless tools like most stores i have chosen a specific brand for most of my cordless tools that brand is for Walt so I have tons of Dewalt batteries like this big fat flexible 60 volt mofo and Walt makes an aftermarket clip on these they do an aftermarket clip that allows you to charge your phone through two USB ports which is pretty cool, but there's an aftermarket Dewalt clip you can also buy that, in addition to the two USB ports, has a 12 port volts so insert this into your battery put your soldering iron on your turn on the soldering iron it starts heating up immediately the max temp you have which is adjustable it heats up pretty quickly and to be honest I think this is my factor of way of favorite sensitivity, all for a soldering iron that I have experienced.

I am ecstatic about this and have been using it. recently and monitoring as I said monitoring my usage patterns I guess I don't need this to get hot for this but I've been monitoring my usage patterns and I think I now have the correct design in my head for a

portable

soldering

station

that allows me a quick to a soldering iron and all the things i might need with that soldering iron i'm building today first things first with a design like this i'm going to gather all the things i plan on having in my

portable

stutter station and then i'm going to figure out how to attach it to my portable soldering station here's what i've learned about my inclinations using soldering iron 1 I need helping hands which is those 2 alligator clips on movable arms to hold your parts Orientation to each other Years ago we covered this in the proof when I showed my cart of electronics.

I found these excellent helping hands from China. I'm going to reuse the ones here. I built those helping hands into my electronics cart with the idea that I like to try and start wherever I need to solder. I have discovered that I am NOT interested in doing that. I have tried to do it. I just find it gets in my way. You can literally lift and drop my workbench, so you'll have helping hands, two of those made of those two made with alligator clips. This is very funny. i invented this beautiful rigid ball joint technology this is an off-brand bee brand that's not such a good version of the same thing so i'm going to trade this for this I'll have wire strippers like these I'll have a torch which is for squeezing the heat shrink tubing soldering of course electrical tape the soldering iron a soldering station which is what holds the pen and steel wool to clean the tip the battery connector a battery again these batteries are going to come out of my battery line when they're loaded and positioned when I need them and some heat shrink tubing.

I've found most of the wiring I do is narrow gauge so I'm only going to have a small complement of this size of heat shrink tubing in my kit I just don't need all the versatility if I need other things it's right there and the nuts for wires are basically a small mechanical connector for a wire that can make a solderless connection, this is just my preference. I love these little ones. I use them all the time. I spend probably around 50 a month. Honestly, I can never keep these in stock, so I'll have a little drawer here with probably a hundred of these at any given time.

Those are all the things I have. it has to fit in a small form factor which doesn't have to be small but one of my other requirements is that i don't want it to take up so much space on my table every time i get close to an electronics project my table gets covered with all this crap so i want a small footprint which i think means a tall device. I'm thinking this device will probably have a five inch square footprint, but it will be tall and the idea is that it will have a low center of gravity so it's stable, but with a narrow footprint so it doesn't take up too much space on the workbench and all these things fit on it vertically and now it's time for you to find out exactly how this all fits into a five inch by five inch vertical package I would love just this as a hunk of steel on the base of this but I don't think I have such a thing to be honest no I don't think I have one well I mean as long as you use the big battery it provides its own significant amount of weight.

I have a couple of these flexes and used them for different things, yeah that's fine. I'm going to operate assuming the battery is the lowest on this ok ok I can see this is a complex problem to solve as there are a lot of moving parts so I'm going to start with the base and the battery connector , I'm going to go from there so I'm going to split my yeah yeah okay once we get it fixed then we'll start growing from there to make sure we can hold all my goal is maybe no more than 18 inches tall to keep all things in orientation yeah lets start off right that's the good stuff oh more good stuff good stuff good stuff bad stuff good stuff good stuff let's take a moment here to talk about plywood it's a particular topic of mine I love plywood amazing plywood but not all plywood is made the same so if you went to a random sawmill and said gimme your gimme a great finish coat you might just get delivered a piece like this that It has really beautiful finished surfaces.

This is a beautiful piece of plywood from both sides from the end. it leaves some for me too you can see it's uh it's i know it looks like a lot of layers one two three four five six seven layers in my experience this plywood which is often sold as a high end finished layer has very little cohesive strength in your gluing infrastructure and there are a lot of voids, for example, as if there was a full void that appeared while cutting it. Voids can fill with hot gases and set your laser cutter on fire. I've seen it happen if you want void las' high end plywood go with something like this arctic birch ply, many more ply and actually I'll show you a close. -up and if you want to see some really egregious stuff like another example that's crap for five that's semi-disguised crap this is the good stuff that's the great sandwich stuffing and this is glued together so there's no gaps so no There are places where these hot gases can build up during a laser cut.

I'm not laser cutting any part of this, so it's not going to come out, but overall, because I love plywood. I tend to like the good things. This right here. This is a moon. This is a single core layer. pulleys in two layers nice and again this 8 inch luan looks great on either side and can be ok to finish off certain things you never have to push it mechanically or anything but from the end you can see it has this big fat soft middle layer and two thin skins on each side and this thing i'm trying to break through there we go it just doesn't have the same tensile strength as other aircraft plies i've collected even these five plies that are a quarter inch thick is a lot a lot better how was that yeah short two minute rant about my feelings about plywood you're welcome start with the base so it's going to have it's going to have I think I'm going to try to mount this oh that's what I do I do i put it like this because always yeah i will mount it to the ground so i put it like this then a welder can plug the side in here just fine okay so what is that form factor yeah five inches ok i'm going to start cutting some pieces to size here and start to rough assemble.

I'm going to break the glue and my nail gun. i'll do it well happy with that happy that you have a certain amount to get out of the way okay so these guys lived there okay these guys come here so they don't have to it should be oneechan they are going to be able so if those live like this here and I have a second it's here now i'm getting somewhere slowly keep drilling holes until i get what i need they're wrong on this maybe i want them here because if they're here and i'm pulling this out yeah i think i want them here ok, that's going to be a separate thing and it's going to be its own sink ok so i can undo that and now i can.

I'm using a lot of crazy glue on this thing. I'm using a lot of cyanoacrylate glue, but that's not to hold it, that's not the end of it, it's to hold everything in orientation until I can use wood screws and get everything to fit. correctly just FYI okay time to do some assembly some assembly required here it comes I'm going to do some glue and yeah okay that's pretty good we're doing pretty alright there he goes this guy blinks real good my handles in the way. methane well hells bells margaret we have a form factor that works we just aren't tall enough i mean the nut on the handles. second this is cool a puff like that so ok now we're down the stretch i'm going to put my little decorations on there the rubber feet you brought him should we try it while the soldering iron heats up? i'll grab a piece of wire we have two pieces of wire and we want to join them so we twist the ends we bring them close to each other using helping hands that's good holds its own weight oh these are good join them like this not a pretty joint i know it's not a nice gasket this is just a proven concept it's not about my soldering skills stop yelling at the screen I'm terrible at soldering I know that however I'm very pleased with my soldering skills I'm so impatient I have to build my portable welding machine of those.

I have one more thing I don't know where it goes which is the heat shrink but that's about as reasonable a place to get flow as any Oh really important keep in mind these aftermarket Dewalt 12 volt adapters if you leave the battery inside for three days, it will drain the battery to such an extreme degree that it can't be charged, so don't leave the battery in the battery holder don't tease the ball happy fun, this has been a day's build and I'm very glad to see you next time