Intro
This is a quick blog to show something I've been working on. To make it a bit more interesting the viewer can try to guess what I am building while watching the first video.
Mystery Build Video
The next video is a just a quick video showing how I used a power nibbler to cut a small panel from the side panel of a desktop PC:
Panel Nibbler Video
Discussion
It may not be obvious, but I broke my left wrist playing sports and I can barely hold the solder with my left hand, so complex projects are difficult right now. I am still working on a bunch of projects, with less productivity and much less availability. Fortunately I managed to get this project completed and documented. It is kind of appropriate or ironic that this project is about building "third hands" that take the load off using hands just when I have fewer hands to do the work.
The need originally arose because I wanted an efficient alternative to using my huge vise arrangement to hold PCBs that I was populating with components. You can see from the video that I progressed from a complex, fiddly solution to something much simpler and ended up with a whole suite of magnetic "holders" capable of flexibly assisting in assembly operations. I am pretty happy that the results are actually useful and I will definitely be taking advantage of the capability in future projects. I am including the .stl file for the grooved bar, in case someone wants to print their own
