TOOL OF THE MONTH
Ralph’s back with Tool of the Month once more, and this time it’s small rotary multi-tools
Ralph on the delights of the Dremel!
Iremember friends waxing lyrical about the Dremel many years ago, but I didn’t really ‘get it’ for a long time. ended up buying a rotary multi-tool for one specific job – removing the security screws from the back door of my printing workshop 20 years ago. Long story, but the Police had battered my back door down, realising they’d got the wrong place! The end result was that I needed to cut a slot in hardened counter-sunk, non-tamper woodscrews. The only tool I could see that would do the job was a very small abrasive cutting disc, so I bought a Dremel with some baby abrasive cutting discs that did the job admirably. After that I discovered that it was the most astonishingly useful tool I never knew I wanted.
From the moniker, I had always assumed it was Germanic in origin, but was actually developed by an Austrian immigrant based in the USA, who founded the Dremel Company in 1932. Originally known as the Moto-tool, it has always been a premium product with a name for quality. There are myriad attachments and accessories available for this most flexible tool.
There have been many copies of the Dremel multi-tool, but to date I have yet to find one on a par with the original, which is why I contacted Bosch, who now own Dremel, to discuss this article. Given I had in the past tried a lesser cordless rotary multi-tool and was extremely disappointed with it, when the guys at Bosch offered me one, I said that I would rather have a ‘proper’ one. They still insisted on sending me a cordless one as well. I made the assumption that it would be heavier and less powerful. The reality was somewhat different. On my postage scales the cordless was a full 10 grammes heavier and I could not find any discernible difference in power using the tool. Having played with both, were I now going out to buy a tool, there is no doubt in my mind that I would take the cordless machine.
The job I use my Dremel for most frequently is cleaning up brake calipers. When I strip a scabby caliper and have removed the piston seal from its groove, I then use the wire wheel that looks like a little chimney sweep’s brush to remove all the corrosion. I have never found another tool that will do the job nearly as well and I would buy one for that job alone. Another regular job for the rotary multi-tool is cleaning out cylinder head ports and the combustion chambers, again using the steel wire brush tool. I have tried the brass versions, but have found that they inevitably leave some brass colouring on aluminium castings and wear out far faster. It should be noted that the wire brushes are not designed to run faster than 15,000rpm. Whilst the genuine Dremel wire brushes are
undoubtedly superior to the cheapo Chinese clones, one can only buy them in packs of two and they are far from cheap.
I’m not going to suggest that a professional race tuner is going to substitute his air-tools, but for those of us wanting to take some meat out of the roof of a four-stroke cylinder head port using a barrel sander attachment, which seems to come with all the kits, the rotary multi-tool will do an excellent job. My previous kit came with a flexible drive to get into tight areas. You attach it to your multi-tool and hang the power unit from the ceiling, or a stand if you have one. I found that the drive sapped a significant amount of power from the original set up, which wasn’t helpful. When I was going to demonstrate the abrasive cutting discs, I decided to
inflict the power-stealing flexible drive to the cordless machine, because any loss of speed on abrasive discs affects performance greatly. The battery tool performed better than its 240-volt predecessor.
One of the sets came with some little sanding discs. One of the machines also came with a side handle so I thought that I would try them out on a badly scratched Z1000 ignition cover that suffered when my Ole Gurl fell over on the drive. One had to be very gentle, but they worked far better than I could ever have expected. Once the big divots were gone, I tried a ‘Scotchbrite’ type buffing wheel. In company with the giant ones I occasionally use on my eight-inch polishing machine it worked really well, but didn’t last very long before it was balder than me.
I have quite a collection of rotary files, burrs and grinding stones of various sizes and grit size. The burrs are great for shaping aluminium and cleaning up aluminium welds. I have never got on especially well with the polishing attachments and think that they are most likely aimed at smaller work pieces than usually found on motorcycles. The one exception being I have used it to polish out very light corrosion in brake caliper bores.
I could say much more about the myriad uses of the rotary multi-tool in a motorcycle workshop, but I have already exceeded my brief. Uses – pretty much limitless!