Sean Ragan has put his old soldering iron to good use:
The upgrade left me with a surplus soldering iron and the opportunity to try a modification which first occurred to me when I was 10 or 11 and still playing around with Dad’s tools in our old garage, which was to try to adapt a soldering pencil barrel to accept the threads of an X-acto Type A blade holder. The idea was to be able to conveniently adapt my trusty hobby knife for hot-blade work, useful for instance in the cutting of plastics.
2 thoughts on “DIY hot knife”
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I’ve done this before – except the thread on the soldering iron happened to match the thread on the knife head so I didn’t have to do as much work.
I had problems with mine, though. When it was heated, the knife head actually softened a bit and would not hold the blade. It was a long time ago, but I’m pretty sure it was a cheap knife (not Xacto or another quality brand) so that’s probably the reason.