General > General Technical Chat
How do you clean and demagnetize your tweezers?
Doctorandus_P:
I bought some of those cheap ceramic tweezers and was pleasantly surprised by them, but indeed they do have some issues.
Out of the box the fitting of the jaws differs greatly. some are near perfect others do not.
So If I grab a new one I first start by adjusting it.
I first bend it open more, to get a bit of extra "stiffness" in them for my big paws.
And also bend them in such a way that the extreme tip closes first.
Then I align them by fist loosening the adjustment screws, make sure they're tight afterwards.
As a last step I grind the ceramic to an exact fit and symmetry with a diamond disk in a dremel.
Some time ago I broke one of the jaws of a ceramic tweezers with my own stupidity.
I taped the metal of the tweezers shut to get a more solid handle and ground a chisel point on the tweezers.
This is a very handy tool for scraping small areas clean, even cutting 0.2mm enameled wire by chiseling it to the FR4.
when ground at around 60 degrees the ceramic chisel can take quite a lot of abuse and stays sharp a long time.
cdev:
To be honest with you, all I have is metal tweezers, and I have never tested them to see if they were magnetized.
Small parts seem to always stick to my tweezers. Ive always thought that the reason ultra small parts stuck to my tweezers was simply surface tension. But I suppose magnetism and parts with some steel in them could be at fault. I am going to have to check that out right now. If indeed I could replace and re-solder those small parts simply by using a ceramic tweezers (or demagnetizing my metal tweezers) that would be just great.
That has to be the most frustrating thing because time and heat kills (complicated or multilayer) boards.
m98:
I always wipe my tweezers with a specialized flux cleaner, nothing sticks to them after that. Works even better than IPA.
jmelson:
Clean with a dip in alcohol or acetone.
I demagnetize mine regularly by turning on a Weller-type soldering gun and passing the tweezers slowly through the loop of the copper heating element. You can pass one half of the tweezers through at a time, flip and do the other side.
Just be sure to have the tweezers well away from the gun before releasing the trigger on the gun.
Jon
EvilGeniusSkis:
I clean the with whatever is appropriate for what I'm trying to get rid of, and demagnetize using a demagnetizer I made out of an electric hair trimmer that had the blades go dull, inside it was just an electromagnet and some levers, get rid of the moving parts and you have one of those cheap chinese demagnetizers.
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