Most men love tinkering with iron and wood, drilling, pounding, screwing and screwing, doing useful things around the house or in the garage. Even one nailed shelf or twisted socket fills us with self-esteem and calm self-confidence. It’s just that it’s not always possible to keep at home a set of tools sufficient for a variety of household chores. We have to take a screwdriver, then a grinder, then a grinding machine. And so it was until the engraver appeared - a universal tool that allows you to carry out many precise work on grinding, drilling, engraving and cutting, and taking up almost no space.
What is an engraver?
An engraver, or a mini-drill, as it is sometimes called, looks like a huge fountain pen with a network connection. If we open the case, we will see that it consists of an engine, a spindle, a gearbox, and an impeller, which cools the engine itself. The housing has openings for removing hot air, as well as a place for holding (on some models a removable handle is provided), an on-off button, a button that blocks the engine, a nut for fixing various nozzles, a speed regulator and a cord for connecting to the network. Most often, the engraver is equipped with an additional ring for hanging on a special tripod. For some models, removable flexible shafts are available, designed to work in hard-to-reach places, for example, in a car or under the sink - such devices are equipped with a Dremel engraver and other expensive mini-drills.
How does he work
The device works due to the fact that the engine spins the shaft (from 3-4 to 35-40 thousand revolutions - the Dremel engraver and the like), rotating, thus, the nozzles attached to it. It is the wide range of nozzles used that forms the universality of this tool - from a drill it turns into a grinder, and then into a grinder. And all this fits in one small box.
Of course, the engraver is significantly inferior in power to its "older brothers", and drilling walls with them, as well as cutting metal sheets, is hardly appropriate, but such a task does not stand before it. Plumbing, home repair, minor preventive maintenance and car repair, engraving, finishing finishing of metal and wooden products - the engraver copes with all this perfectly.
How to choose an engraver?
First of all, it is necessary to determine the range of tasks that this tool should solve. Would you like to polish your home gold once a month? Or from morning till night to work with him in the studio? Depending on this, it is worth choosing an assistant:
- Power. As a rule, it ranges from 30 to 300 watts. The higher the power, the more materials you can work with. The engine resource, the time of working with the engraver in one go - it all depends on the power parameter. As a rule, household engravers are rarely more powerful than 100-150 W (this includes the Dremel 3000 engraver ), while professional engravers, in turn, are 175-200 W ( Dremel 4000 engraver ).
- Weight. If there is no need for a powerful, super-productive engraver, then you should not buy models weighing more than a kilogram, because working with such an instrument will become very difficult and tedious. Light and productive mini-drills include, first of all, the Dremel engraver.
- Ergonomics. The engraver should not only work well, but also be comfortable in your hand - otherwise you will spend half of your work time doing finger exercises. The same goes for weight distribution - the closer the center of gravity to your fingers, the easier it will work.
- Noise, vibration, heating. Everything is quite simple here - the more expensive the device, the less problems it creates. In high-end models, these problems are solved with a good margin of safety - including this is why they have such a high price tag. Cheap models regularly suffer from overheating, they are characterized by a manufacturer’s marriage, but there is little noise from them - they are rather weak. But the mid-price engravers can warm up, vibrate and make noise - they have enough power, and manufacturers turn a blind eye to minor inconveniences.
- Equipment. Almost every engraver is equipped with a set of nozzles. Its completeness depends on many factors, but in most cases, experienced users buy additional nozzles - either as a kit, or separately. Even with the most careful use, nozzles are consumables, and from time to time they will have to be purchased.
Which company to buy an engraver?
There are a number of manufacturers of engravers on the market - Hammer, Makita, Hitachi, Sturm. The most popular and common is the Dremel engraver. The tools of this company have become so famous that it is used as the name of all such devices - "engraver" and "Dremel" can be heard equally often.
In any case, it is worth choosing an engraver, carefully reading the opinions of consumers about a particular model. And the engraver Dremel reviews deserves only positive: tens of thousands of users give the highest ratings to the line of these tools. And you should not, of course, focus on Chinese counterparts - it’s better not to save on manual power tools.