How to Adjust The Spider Legs

This is a spider. Its purpose is to hold things down while you're soldering, help keep them aligned and positioned correctly. When you're adjusting it, you would basically hold the piece that you're going to be working with the end that you wanna focus, that that weight on, meaning that this heat, this weight is gonna transfer from here down to here. So we would hold that end in a position where we wanted it and we could move the weight up and down to get different angles and different positioning on it. It would give us more or less weight as, as needed and or different heights as needed. Maybe we wanted to get this way up on the block, then we could put this up on a, on a soldering block and we might be, have, might have some better positioning for it. It has three legs, it has a 22 and a half, 90 and a 45. Each of those legs will serve different functions as we go on and show you later in the video. So this is the original spider. It was designed for pieces typically larger than one square inch. This cube that you're looking at here is about one square inch. Of course it's a cubic inch, but we would only be looking at the top as the, or a piece around that size. So that's still satisfactory size for that. However, we also have a model Called the mini spider, or actually it's called the spider mini. It comes with four legs, one of which has points in case you have to get even smaller than than might be otherwise. Again, it assembles, it has a 45 and 90 and the, the um, 22 and a half leg and then it's got the 90 with a point and uh, 90 straight. Again, it would be used the same way. We'd hold that into the embellishment or whatever part that you're using and basically just push up or down on the, on the spider cube to get higher or lower positioning. So it's function is to place a controllable amount of weight at specific points to assist in the assembly components like balls, flowers, leave bales, bezels, and other embellishments to a back plate. When you're soldering, it helps you avoid using a third hand, which has a pair of tweezers that have a large heat sink. There are many times when you're gonna want to avoid using a pair of tweezers because of the heat sink properties of it and then trying to hold it. Also, a lot of people are like myself and they have the shakes and it's very difficult to place something while you're soldering without shaking, especially when you have heat aiming at the same pace as you're working. So the works really well for that. So there are times when it would be really nice to have, um, a heat sink here and that would be for, similar to this particular bale right here, where we're gonna go flat on this piece and there's a little bit of this's gonna sweat solder. So there's a little bit of solder on the other side of this particular piece of metal here and, and the spider's coming down, touching it. By having that spider there, we're able to heat the spider and get it almost red hot or red hot before we even have to worry about heating the rest of this. So as that gets hot, as soon as we think it's hot enough, all we have to do is flash this down here and it'll, it will go ahead and solder the solder flow like it should. Rather than having to heat this back plate up and, and worry about a pair of tweezers that's in the way, or or trying to hold it by hand, you have the spider there to hold it for you.

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