Uses of the dremel
 

I see so very often the tool "Dremel" mentioned here, with good reason. How many uses can you think of for this tool having to do with cycling?

anything too delicate for die-grinder. A great tool. Among 100 other uses, I use a dremmel cut off wheel to cut brake cables to length for squareness and not crimping the I.D. for unimpeded cable travel.
George

Don't you mean casing with regard to I.D.?

Yea usually when the word dremel comes to mind i think "cable cutter"

I think toe-nail cutter.

Enjoy

I used it to "help out" a cable stop that was a touch too narrow for the ferrules for the nice braided derailleur cables I bought. Thankfully, I only had to do one.....

I cut casing with it too.

I thought cutting cable housing was *MY* trick. :)

I've used mine for all kinds of stuff. Even cut a set of car springs with one.

:eek: :eek: :eek: that's like cutting the spring on your rear shock to shorten travel ....

yeah I meant casing or housing. I cut the cable with a wire cutters. The trick is with the tephlon coated casings is the heat from the demmel cut off wheel can clog the casing by melting the internal coating even if making a nice slow square cut without crimping the casing closed like you get with a pair of cutters. What I do then is follow ream with a very fine drill and sometimed hit the casing end with a slight chamfer bit to take the I.D. burr off the casing for the cleanest cable actuation. I just reworked a couple of the Campy cables that came on my new Bianchi that were not quite right and they really work smooth.
George

Don't you mean teflon ?

nope tephlon. Its a derivative and hence the similar trade name. Tephlon is more commonly used in brake and derailleur housings because it has a slightly more robust styrenic block co-polymer. Read up on it...well try to anyway.
:D
George

dremel's are excellent at polishing/sanding off old rust in hard to reach places, i.e bb shell.

Dremels re also excellent at boring out cable stops to allow you to run full housing......

I had a set of screws chemically welded to the water bottle cage on a used bike I picked up. The screw heads were stripped too - out comes the dremel. I took off a little bit of two sides of the screw head so that the my pliers could get a grip.

Basically, the dremel comes out whenever there's a non-standard problem that needs a-solvin.

The wire brushes are great for removing all kinds of surface rust and corrosion when working on older bikes.

The cutoff wheels will handle surprisingly tough jobs as long as you dont get em' sideways; I trimmed off the bottom of a front DR cage on my home-built recumbent.

I used to have Speedplay Frogs on my roadbike. Then I switched shoes and my new shoes (Sidi road shoes) weren't drilled with SPD-style mounting holes so I had to get the Sidi SPD adapters. Unfortunately the adapters didn't have a large enough cleat box to accomodate the Frog cleats so I had to trim the heavy plastic to get them to fit. It took me a couple of hours with the dremel. The problem was that I was using a cordless dremel which would crap out after about 15 minutes of continuous use and there was a lot of heavy plastic to trim so I needed to recharge the thing a number of times. And while the dremel did the job, needless to say the whole setup was less than elegant. Stack height was high, adapter was flexy, lots of extra weight, etc... I switched to pure road pedals with cleats that bolted up nicely to my shoes shortly afterwards so the whole thing became moot.

Lately I've been using it to cut leather.......and D.I.Y. dental work, among other things.

Tee Hee! So do I... about every three months or so. I use the 1 cm diameter sand paper bit and just sand those buggers down to size. It's a lot easier than the "clip" or "snip" type clippers. Less chance of injury to the dog too!

Dremel, Duct Tape, vice grips and a pair of screwdrivers can solve pretty much anything that goes wrong with our house. :)

I just used my Dremel to cut some cable housing, and it's great for that!

But it's not great for cutting the cables themselves . . . sucker unraveled all the way to the pinch bolt! Next time, it's diagonal pliers for me!

Nice saddle cut there, fixer.
The Dremel can be used for so many odd things. It works so well my friend never returned it. I should go get it one of these days, that mofo, lol.

i'm surprised! no one mentioned the frozen-and-stripped-bolt situation. when i encounter a frozen bolt with a stripped head (after using penetrating oil and tapping with a hammer and such) you can just get the dremel out and cut a nice new slot for a slotted screwdriver. recently did this to a campy record front derailleur (very carefully) that had a frozen and stripped limit screw and it worked like a charm. yay dremel.

I should start a thread "pics of your dremel" to compliment this one

ya, I whittled away a pair of sidi winter shoes for frogs. The biggest job that I ever did was slot a metal roof so that I could slide a new set of metal panels under for a covered porch add-on. My rotozip was 60 miles away. I used a few cutoff wheels, but it did the job okay.

For you car buffs out there...a Dremmel cut off wheel works very well for cutting off clip on weights from those precious high end alloy wheels without putting grooves in the alloy or harming the clear coat as with clip-on weight pliers.
George
Nice work Fixer on your Brooks. Is that a Swift? Wonder if trimming the shirt on that Brooks will weaken and cause the seat to stretch over time. Most punch holes and tie up the sides under the seat on old Brooks for a bit more suport.
George