I posted this which had a crushed needle and....while waiting for new parts to arrive, I have been working on the needle as I was able to get .15mm wire yes, I should have gotten the .17mm but it had to do for now. The tip of the wire was filed using a mini file. I needed a crimper to complete the work so I used a mini nail puller. It was hard drilling a small hole so I took a small sized drill bit and put it between the jaws of the nail puller and with a hard blow I made a nice ding on the jaws which was then later tapered using a dremel cone shaped diamond bit. Even using glasses, it was difficult to put the wire into the hole but I managed somehow and crimped it as shown here Somehow the hole shaft was a bit uneven and my smallest bit was .20mm. Broke 1 bit in the process but as you will see in the next 2 pictures, the aperture is slightly bigger than the wire. Here is the picture of it mounted on the vaporizer. And what I did here was to prime with alcohol and to speed up heating the vaporizer opened the rapid preheater and just as the alcohol wasy dying down, shut off the preheater and opened the spindle. No sputtering kerosene on the jet and a nice white light was obtain as shown here To me the satisfaction of getting a mangled needle into service was a great satisfaction Thanks for looking. Ron
Well done, what always breaks my mind is :how do you get the broken needle part out of the base part ? Piano wire would be a nice replacement. Maybe every music instrument wire will do the job.
Hey Wim, IT IS piano wire actually. Well, on my needle base there was a little bit protruding so I just pulled it off. With a .23mm drill bit, I cleaned the inside hole. I did use a table magnifier as the hole is definitely way to small to get the wire into the hole Ron
Ron, Besides you fettling skills, your macro photography is excellent. May I inquire as to the camera and lens you were using and their settings? Regards, Dan
Hi Dan, well, I am only using a Sanyo Xacti CG6 camera that has a macro mode. And the pictures were done holding it. It perhaps would be a tad sharper if I use my tripod which I was lazy to take out. Pictures were taken under florescent lighting. I could do some adjustments in the camera but I opted to adjust the brightness working with photoshop instead . I must say the camera does a good job on macro mode considering the light set up. The camera takes wonderful dalylight videos in H264 which is compatible with YouTube but dissmal performance when taking night videos as it has too much noise. Ron
