There's only so much stuff that can be working correctly
in the universe at one time.

I scored a *really* nice Thor D-handle drill at a garage sale last
week, ten bucks.

This weekend I had some spare time so I took the Jacobs chuck off
and dismantled it, cleaned it, and re-assemebled. Then I figured
the cord was pretty old and the plug was punky I would change that
out too.

I had a nice heavy duty cordset with a molded plug, so it was
an easy change. I was gonna have a nice D-handle drill to
compliment my smaller milwaukee.

While doing the cord I figured the cord clamp wasn't *quite*
grabbing the cord enough, so I thought some heat-shrink on the
cord OD would improve matters. A quick trip to the heat-shrink
department and then I fired up the heat gun to do the deed on
it.

There was an impressive *Pop* from the innards of the heat gun,
and then smoke began to gently waft from the air intake. Turns
out the handle (which had been spinning a bit loose for a while,
this is an elderly Veeco that I've had for years) had finally
spun enough to short the neutral wire against the hot switch
lead.

So after I put electrical tape on the drill cordset instead,
and had that all back together, I opened up the heat gun next.

Cleaned out all the crud in there, cut back the linecord and
also put red locktite on the handle (too bad I didn't do
that 20 years ago!) and generally cleaned up the wiring which
was, honestly, kinda haywire. "Who the hell made this mess,"
oh it was me. There were even wire nuts in there! I could
replace those with soldered joints and put some heat-shrink
tubing.... well, never mind, wire nuts lasted 20 years so
far.

So now the drill and the heat gun work. So something else
is fixing to go bust anytime now...

Jim


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