Twists and Turns

Ten years ago (or was it fifteen?) I got a Dremel for Christmas. I wanted a Dremel, because I saw my friend Andy using one and it looked useful. If you’ve never seen one, a Dremel is a wand-shaped tool that spins really fast. You can put attachments on the end and use it to cut, grind, sand, and drill stuff.

Below my desk is a plastic briefcase full of “blending” markers. A couple of years ago, I watched someone on YouTube draw using a set of blending markers. It fascinated me. The next day I went to Hobby Lobby and bought a wide assortment of blending markers. Good blending markers, like Copic brand, cost $6 each, and according to every thirteen-year-old girl on YouTube you need at least 2,583 markers to draw anything. I went the “cheap” route and bought a 32 pack of off-brand markers for around a hundred dollars. I came home and drew a picture of Malachai from Children of the Corn. Then I put the markers in a plastic briefcase and pushed it under my desk. My foot is resting on the briefcase under my desk right now, where it will remain until I die.

Anyway, back to the Dremel. The Dremel is the tool-world’s version of a Ginsu knife (or Gallagher’s “Sledge-O-Matic”). It does a whole lot of things, depending on which attachment you use. The Dremel I received came with only a small handful of accessories, so immediately acquiring more became paramount. At a garage sale, I found some poor sod who used to own a Dremel but was getting rid of it. He had a lot of little packages of cutting attachments. I bought them all, along with another big mamma-jamma container full of 150 tiny bits.

The reason I’m writing about my Dremel is because I need to solder something. A Dremel can’t solder things — that’s what a soldering iron is for — but my soldering iron has a bunch of old solder caked on it. I searched YouTube for “how to get old solder off a soldering iron” and found a guy who said you can sand it off using a Dremel.

The only reason I own a soldering iron is because of mod chips. Mod chips were chips that could be installed in video game consoles that allowed you to bypass copy protection and play pirated games. The first mod chips for the original PlayStation came with four wires that needed to be soldered to the system’s motherboard. I bought a soldering iron for that purpose. The first soldering iron I bought was under-powered, so I bought a second one. That one got gunked up with dried solder all over it, so I bought a third one. That one was garbage, too. I haven’t soldered anything since the late 1990s, but I’ve own three soldering irons. I just threw the two cheap ones away. That leaves me with one that is covered in old solder.

So, right, the Dremel. I couldn’t find it. I found some of the accessories, then I found some more of them, but I couldn’t find the Dremel. Some of the accessories were in my red toolbox. Some were in a plastic shoe box. Finally, I found the Dremel in the bottom of a different toolbox.

Yesterday I decided it was dumb to have my Dremel and its accessories stored in three different locations, so I went to Big Lots in search of a tackle box to store everything in. I couldn’t find a tackle box, but they did have a three-level plastic storage thing designed to carry lunches. I thought it would work great, so I bought it and brought it home. I then spent a couple of hours finding every one of my Dremel accessories and sorting them into little bins. The grinding wheels went in one bin and the buffing pads went in another one. The Dremel gets a tray all by itself, one that was probably designed to carry sandwiches. The third tray is full of random accessories. I don’t know what any of them do but it seems important to keep them.

So after finding my Dremel and all my accessories, sorting all the attachments into my my carrying case, digging out my old soldering iron, and cleaning off a place to work in the garage, I sanded all the old solder off of my soldering iron. It took about thirty seconds.

I still don’t know what all these Dremel attachments are for. I will spend some time today looking each one up on the internet and figuring it out. Maybe I will make a little cheat sheet using my $100 marker set and tape it to the inside of my plastic lunch container that has been refashioned into a Dremel carrying case.

I forgot what I was going to solder.