This machine has a long, ball bearing mounted main shaft (distance from disc to disc is approx. 360mm) and adjustable protective guards to work cleanly with polishing pastes. The right polishing arbor is screwed on and can be removed to use different accessories. It has a powerful drive through DC motor with speed control (full-wave electronics) for high starting torque and enormous traction even during strong contact pressure. Firm mounting with screws, but also with the attached screw clamp in the horizontal or vertical position. Included with the original equipment are a muslin polishing wheel (100 x 15mm), fabric polishing wheel (100 x 15mm) and a polishing bar (paste, 25 x 28 x 92mm).

Dremel Rotary Tool 101: Master Dremel tools with our comprehensive guide. Learn about models, accessories, and exciting DIY project ideas.

Find the right tool for your project. Since 1932, Dremel® has been helping Makers with its full line of versatile, easy-to-use tool systems that deliver the perfect solution for almost any project.

A rotary tool is essential for many makers. It has so many different bits and attachments, it can be used in a variety of ways.

Materials for a Fume/Soldering Ventilation System with Ideas and Links for an Optional Particulate Ventilation System Contents1 Why Do I Need Ventilation?2 Fluxes3 Solders4 My New Soldering Area Fume Ventilation System5 Suggested Items to Purchase 6 Instructions for Putting the Fume … Continue reading →

Get the Most Out of Your Dremel: If you're like me (and I'm sure a lot of you are) you own a Dremel. This versatile tool is perfect for preforming odd jobs when you don't want to get out a power tool. With (hundreds?) of attachments, this tool can do anything from drill a small hol…

Chart that lists all the accessories available for the Dremel tool.

Here you will find a quick reference guide to all the accessories and attachments I have used with my Dremel 4000. The Dremel website provides only dry official info about each. My intent is to giv…

Just posting about last weekends show and some great tools I have been using lately. The show was good. Nice to see other artists and get out of the snow bank and socialize a little. It’s bee…

We humans are fascinating creatures. For no apparent reason we are capable of generating a very strong and urgent need for new gadget. Or maybe it’s a male thing? Regardless I ended up in the situation where I felt very strongly that I couldn’t live without owning a stationary

There are many Dremel projects to be done from start to finish in just a few hours. These crafts are fun and allow you to use your Dremel in many ways.

To create a high shine on our polymer clay pieces, we use our Dremel rotary tool for buffing. We have been making our own buffing pads to fit onto the Dremel for quite a few years now and also have t

Soldering Is NOT Rocket Science!: I've seen so many articles on electronic soldering that are either overly verbose and hard to read, too complex for a beginner, insist on expensive tools, or are just plain wrong, that I decided to clear the air a bit by going back to the basics. Wh…

JewelryMonk is dedicated to training jewelry makers in the basic and advanced techniques of jewelry making.

Rock carvings aren't just for the ancient Mayans- we have a Dremel! My girls are rock-collectors (meaning, if we exit the house for 5 seconds they have

Every year I cut a LOT of silver wire into tens of thousands of jump rings. As the saw bites through the precious metal, it throws off lemel, the metal equivalent of sawdust. Unlike sawdust, silve…

The Rescue The other day, Mom and I are eating lunch and we hear “smack!”. A bird had flown into the window. I looked outside and see a cat investigating something on the porch so I went out there and when I had determined that the cat hadn’t yet done anything to the little fellow, I scooped him up and figured he’d take off the second I opened my hand. He wouldn’t fly so we put in the loquat tree and waited until he shook off the incident and finally flew off. Sanding Makes a Mess I mentioned that I had made a new “contraption” for my workshop. Well, here it is. Sanding metal makes a huge mess. I wear goggles and a respirator (of course), but that doesn’t mean I’m okay with all the metal dust particles left all over the workshop. So usually I sand outside, but that entails carrying all my stuff out there and of course I never remember to bring everything I need on my first trip out. So here’s my solution. I took a regular cardboard file box and cut off the top. Then I cut two “arm” holes in the front. I taped Saran plastic wrap to seal the top. Then I took some latex kitchen gloves, cut off the fingers, splayed open the wrist portion, and taped them to the two “arm” holes. Now I can sand inside the box and all the dust stays put. Yay! Jewelry Oh, I don’t think I showed you these. I made them for myself (steel and resin/paint). Also made this for myself. Google Trends Want another internet way of wasting time? Check out Google Trends. Put in keywords and see what’s trending on Google (or what other people are searching for on Google and what country they’re from). As About.com puts it: “This isn't a measure of searches, but it is a measure of what people are talking about on the Internet.” I found it interesting that the U.S. comes up first when searching on the word “handcrafted” and Vietmam comes up first when searching on the word “handmade”. But put in “handmade jewelry” and we’re back to the U.S. When you scroll down, you can see the top related searches. I just find this stuff interesting. You can compare search terms. For example, “handmade jewelry” seems to have (for the past ten years at least) always been searched on way more than “handcrafted jewelry”. “Handmade” and “artisan” are must closer in searches… … until you add the word jewelry to them. Then we have an even larger split. Just something to kill 15 minutes when you want to play around with words. Who knows, it may help with your SEO.

Hi Everyone, Today's post is long with a lot of detours as I point out various bits and pieces. At Morrisburg a while back I did a tutorial on how to make the Michael Buessler beads and how I sand them. While people ooh-aahhed over the beads by far the most enthusiasm was for how I sanded them. I will post a bit on the beads later but here's how I go about my sanding (though there's a twist that I tried today that I didn't teach at Morrisburg). What you need: - dremel tool with assorted collets and drill bits - drywall sandpaper - 180 grit wet/dry sandpaper - Mr. Clean magic eraser If you have a dremel tool one of the most useful accessories is the dremel collet set which allows you to use various drill bit sizes. You can see a picture of the kit here here. The kits are cheap, particularly at this website since I paid more than 2x that at our local home depot. The first step is to put the bead on the drill bit. When I make the beads I start with a hole in them, but if you don't have a hole, just drill a bit through - it's actually desirable to have the bit snug in the bead. It'll loosen up and I'll get to that in a bit. Put some damp paper towel or rag underneath some drywall sandpaper. The damp paper towel keeps a lot of the dust down. For those that are concerned about clay dust, you may want to wear a dust mask during this portion. Couple of points: if the damp is too damp, you'll end up generating a nice spray of fine clay bits all over anything in the area. If it's too dry you'll end up generating more dust. Lay the drywall sandpaper on top. I can't take credit for the drywall sandpaper idea, Cathy M from Guild taught us the value of this tool, and she got it from someone who got it from someone who got it from one of the clay greats... You can see in the first section of the photo below (click on the photo to get a bigger image, I can't figure out how to make it larger in the blog) that I've roughly shaped the bead into a cylinder, but there are a lot of sharp edges on it. The bead is fully baked at this point. If you're curious as to how I got the first three images together as one image, I brought them into Microsoft PowerPoint, grouped them, then clicked on the grouping and exported as jpeg. IMPORTANT!!! Before touching the dremel tool to the sandpaper, make sure that you've got your speed set to the lowest speed. I didn't on one of the beads and I bent the mandrel that the bead was sitting on and the bead went flying off across the room. Which brings me to another MORE IMPORTANT point - wear protective eye covering since unusual things can and will happen. OK, enough detour, back to the lesson. Turn on the machine and press it against the drywall paper. It should start to smooth out as you can see in the middle photo. Sometimes what will happen is that the drill bit will go all the way through the bead and the bead will start spinning on the bit rather than the bit spinning the bead. This is OK, it just makes the process a bit slower. I'm not sure why it happens, on some beads it does and some it doesn't. For whatever reason the red beads that I made do this more than some of the other colours. If I get frustrated I'll move to a larger drill bit and that will last a while. I'm tempted to try to bake the bit into the clay and see what happens with that (though that's how I bent the mandrel). There's some trial and error here. Feel free to try to push down harder on the edges to give a more tapered bead (I'll show that in a different posting) and to flip the bead on the bit. You can also start experimenting with speeds, but go slow! Eventually (in my photos it was about three - five minutes) you'll get the bead smooth as in the third part of the first photo. Now you're ready to move onto the sanding sponge. This is a sanding sponge that's 180 grit that I bought in the paint department of our hardware store. I dampen the sponge and hold the tool to the sponge. At this point there's quite a bit of spinning of the bead and it doesn't take any pressure at all to make the bead stop spinning while the bit continues. Adding more water seems to help. You'll generate a bit of clay sludge on the sandpaper - that's actually useful because it serves as a finer grinding surface and helps with the polishing. Once you've got it as smooth as you think you can get it (you want the big scratches removed from the first sanding), you're ready to move onto the next step. The sanding sponge if everything goes well takes maybe a couple of minutes tops. But, if you're futzing with the bead because it's so slippery on the bit then it'll take longer. This next step is where I differed from what I taught at Morrisburg. I've been seeing things on the Internet alluding to the Mr. Clean Magic Erasers being good as clay tools(if you don't know what I'm talking about, you can go see it here) though I haven't seen anything concrete (I haven't been looking too hard). So I thought I'd try this today. Tore a piece off one of the ones that I had, dampened it and tried running the bead on it. Beauty!!! It took away all of the fine scratches with no problems and I was ready to move onto the buffing. At this point my bead is way too loose on the bit to make it useful for buffing. I switched to one of my other dremel tool attachments. I'm a complete newbie when it comes to the dremel tool. My husband gave me one for Christmas and I've been experimenting with it on and off. So this piece looked like it might work on the bead. But, as you can see after a couple of minutes buffing, the bead broke because one of the slices separated. No big deal unless you're making a matched pair, just remove the slice and put the bead back on. I played around on a variety of surfaces with the buffing. A shop towel paper towel seems to work just as well as anything. And here's the finished buffed piece. All told, it's probably 10 minutes of polishing, but no scraped fingernails, and no futzing for many minutes before baking the bead trying to get a perfect cylinder. Hope this helps. If anyone else discovers some modifications to what I've said here that make things even easier, I'd love to hear about them. Enjoy, Sandy

In response to the Make: Newsletter Special Edition (on Tips) that we sent out yesterday, MAKE pal, and automata artist, Dug North sent us a link to a

Wooden dapping punches are useful little things to have about the jewelry studio. They are gentle tools, and won’t mark your metal the way metal punches will. To the uninitiated – and t…

Like turning geodes into air plant containers and etching glass jars.

Ever wonder what you need when it comes to basic silversmithing tools and supplies? This is a comprehensive list of the tools every beginner silversmith needs.

Dremel tools are bringing endless opportunities; there are so many different Dremel tool uses you can tackle. Check out six things you can accomplish with a Dremel tool.

An Improvement to a Dremel Tool: The cutoff wheel is one of my favorite tools for use on a Dremel. But, the little discs do not last long when cutting on a piece of sheet metal and frequently need to be changed. That means I need to have a screwdriver at hand to remove the small sc…

Choosing the Right Bur -

Read this article about an experiment comparing the two buff prep methods raking and singeing and see the result to guide you with your buff prep.

Craft this custom clamp to aid when carving your custom stones.

JewelryMonk is dedicated to training jewelry makers in the basic and advanced techniques of jewelry making.

I’m frequently asked about the Dremel speed one should use on a particular material. It’s tough for me to know all of the possible accessory/speed/material combinations, as I haven’t tried them all. Thankfully, I found an excellent resource that holds the answers – a series of charts that includes the recommended speed settings for specific […]