Spider Hold down Tool – Demo Three Projects

This is a spider hold down tool. You can see some instructions on the front and a place to go to learn how to use a tool, spider hold down tool.com. Typically when I open 'em up, it's easiest just to take a razor knife and slice down between the rods all the way to the end and around the ends it's a little bit difficult to unwrap so the razor knife works real well. Once you do get the wrappers off, you'll end up with four pieces that look kinda like this. Notice that they have a 90 degree angle, a 45 degree angle, and a 22 and a half or pretty close to that. To assemble a tool, you just slip the rod in any hole. They can fit in any one of them. There's no specific sequence. They may be a little bit grier oily, so you may need to clean 'em off. And as time goes on, you may need to clean them up once in a while by hitting them with some steel wall or a piece of sandpaper. And uh, you might want to even uh, oil 'em once in a while before you put 'em away. As you use 'em, these ends will turn black. That's exactly what you want to happen because that black is just a layer of carbon with a layer of carbon on there. It's gonna be very difficult to end up soldering into something by accident. The various angles are for doing various kinds of projects. Let me show you a few. You'll want to use the appropriate end of the spider to hold the pieces in place depending on the angle that you need held. For example, in this particular piece, you're gonna need to have this bale flat against that back plate in order for that to solder correctly. So it'll go on there, something like this with this spider leg touching right on that particular spot and holding it there during the soldering process. When we get our cider set up, we want a low angle on it so that we can get our spider leg at the right angle there to touch as much as possible. And yet stay out of the way. Here are a few pictures for the correct setup for this application. Notice the angles. Notice that the weight is transferred from the cube to the ba. So now that it's ready, let's go ahead and solder. I'm gonna start heating the back until the white goes away. I'm gonna make sure I go from side to side. I don't wanna go around the front and melt that bale. Uh, I'm gonna watch for the solder to flow from the bale to the back plate. When it does, I'm gonna stop 'cause that means my bale has been well attached as soon as it flows. There it is. I'm, I'm gonna go ahead now back out the camera so that you can see how we're going to keep ourselves from getting burned. I'm gonna grab it by the cube because that rod is really hot and it'll burn you. I'm gonna spin that around and drop it into the water and that'll let it quench and cool. Then I'll get my piece in the uh, pickling water and cool it off. And that's it for one application. Let's look at another. When I was putting these leaves on earlier, uh, I just laid them on there and soldered the plate and this one over here appeared pretty well. But this one here didn't adhere at all. So I'm going back at it again. And when I was trying to position this, it wasn't wanting to sit as straight as I would like and I don't want it to move this time. So I'm gonna just use the spider to hold it down right there Up a stretch so it doesn't pull away the hot top before we up the other gives an opportunity the top before solder blow sold out the plate there seems gone on the bottom. Electric over here. Melt down flower. Make sure the top going down there it did. Okay, good to go with that one again. Into the water with the hot tip by picking up the cube, picking up the cube, going into the hot water. Do not touch the rods. Alright, so what I wanna do now is I want to get this leave here on here like this. I want to leaning it at an angle. I want it almost over the bezel but not quite. So holding that with a pair of wheezers while I do it is still one of the methods that I would use. But I stand a lot of problems with that. Staying stable and getting the right angle, all that kind of stuff. So one of the things the spider's really good for is to help hold things like that. One of the problems with holiness with the third hand and positioning it, it is trying to get it to stay. Number one in the third hand, just like that. It's flipped right out of there. And then getting this the third hand of an angle that's gonna work for me third hand is a great tool, don't get me wrong, it's just that there's some things that doesn't work real well on. This is one of them. So let's get it up here on the block and and see what we can do with it. I pre soldered it on the back. I know I want it to sit in there like that and if it doesn't have a nice contact on both points, it's not gonna solder well. So I will take and give a little bit of a file job here. Okay, those are where I want it to sit. So my back has got some solder on it. So let's see if we can make the spider hold it just like that. So I want an angle leg that's going to adequately come in and hold it straight in. Let's see if I can position this around the other side so the can see it better. Obviously I have to have something to stop it and stabilize this piece a little bit that don't want be pushed around either. Okay, so what is my least angle? This looks like about my least angle right there and I can get it down a little bit. The objective is transfer the weight from here down through this rod onto the flower so it holds in place. No futsing around one time setup. We're touching real good. I can see it from looking back through this way. We have minimal contact in the flower 'cause there's that little bump right in the middle of the flower and even if there was, it'd still be pretty minimal contact. Alright, we're still looking good and I just bumped the table and guess what? Nothing moved. That's a good sign. Alright, so let's get that little flower. So on there we flu this previously, but I'm gonna get a little bit more flux on there because I did last time. All right, this thought'll be real interesting because now we got this great big plate. We got that little bitty flour. If we get the flour too hot, we'll melt it. We get the leaves too hot, we'll melt in and we gotta have the spider hot enough to uh, not pull our heat away. So let's just going ahead and get the warmed up. Get up. Okay. Stuff's getting red enough. It should be pretty hot up here. Should be able to do some work. So I'm gonna hit, I'm gonna underneath it. Make sure it goes to those two leaves. I got flow on one side, flow on the other. Yes I do. Da uh, alright again, pick up the spider by the, by the block into the water. Gotta let it cool for a second. Where we get it off that block is all that flux I got on it under the water. We get to inspect. Nice. Very nice. Okay, so I use the spider this time to put down a leaf after I had trouble with just had 'em laying there. I've still managed to maintain so I can close my bezel. I got a real nice well done attachment on the, on the flower where it goes to the back. I didn't have to do a whole lot of work on it. Okay, there's two uses of the spider. Alright, let's, uh, let's go for another use here. I've got mercury already to go, so I'm gonna place 'em down there. I made a line across the back so I know where my ring's gonna go. I get it positioned here with that line this direction. I am gonna make sure I line up the line in the back with the center of my double band ring here. And then I'm gonna look down on top and say, okay, does it look right there? It does, it does. Now this is offset a little bit on the front. The line is not perfect so I don't expect it to be here. And then I'm gonna set the, the spider up on here like so and she should be pretty stable right there. And here's where we're looking at. We're gonna fire up now and we're not gonna heat the ring. We're only gonna heat the backlight or the dime, the flow from the, from the dime. I'm sorry. Watch solder flow from the ring to the dime. I don't wanna melt the dime, don't want any of that going on flow. There, there, there both sides. Okay. Into the water now the dime getting pickled in the water and mercury is looking pretty good. Nice and clean on the back. A little bit of polishing will help a lot here. So those are the three pieces. I use the spider to help me put 'em together today. Thanks for watching. You can get the spider out there. It's spider hold down tool.com. Well, I got your attention. I also set on something called the soldering board. It's, it's a regular board with the lazy Susan on the back when it gets pretty bad and old and ugly, you can turn it over. You see this one's been done that way. What it allows me to do is when I'm assembling things, sometimes it's very difficult to put certain things in certain places. Like when you're placing solder and things and you have to get your hand in funny angles. Sometimes it works real nicely to just be able to spin the plate and put your pieces where you want them. I'll make another video on that at some other point. Thank you for watching.

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