Carefully made home-made jigsaw will be little inferior to the factory-made, and in some respects even superior. It is not difficult to assemble such an electric jigsaw if the necessary materials are available.
Self-made structures of an electric jigsaw and a table jigsaw with an electric drive
Next, let us describe a simple scheme of transforming a hand jigsaw into an electric jigsaw (thermal jigsaw):
Preparing the Basics
The design of the jigsaw consists of the following parts: the frame, the handle, the heating thread, the on-off button, the screw clamps, the insulating washer, the shackle and the power cord. The frame requires duralumin tubing with an outside diameter of up to 12 mm.
Instead of a tube, you can use thick plywood or textolite with a thickness of at least 10 mm. The lighter the frame, the easier it will be to use the jigsaw. It is necessary to provide a channel for laying the power cord. The best shape for a U-shaped frame is one side bent at 45˚, not 90˚ like the side adjacent to the handle.
The barb should be made from 1mm thick copper sheet. The earring is attached to the frame with screws at the joint between the frame and the handle. The wing nut, the screw and the earring form the clamp in which the heating thread will be fixed. The clamping jaws are made of duralumin sheet (up to 0.8 mm) and the on-off button is installed between them.
Mounting the electrical components
You can use a nichrome spiral from a household heater, such as an iron, as a heating thread. The thread is fastened between the ends of the frame leads with some tension. A voltage of about 14 V must be applied to the filament to heat it up. It is recommended to use a rheostat to control the operating mode.
The current consumption is determined by the length and thickness of the nichrome filament. With the rheostat it is convenient to set the optimal current strength (within 3-5 A), which affects the temperature to which the filament is heated. The amperage is adjusted before starting work. If the current is too high, the material to be cut may ignite, if the current is too low, the cut will not take place. The easy to make jigsaw allows you to cut parts with complex contours from a wide variety of materials.
Table electric jigsaw with their own hands
When it is necessary to cut parts of small size, the hand-held electric jigsaw is not quite convenient. First of all, due to the fact that quite a heavy jigsaw has to hold and guide the workpiece with only one hand. This disadvantage is deprived by a table jigsaw. The simplest tabletop jigsaw can be assembled in less than an hour. You will need a hand jigsaw, a small piece of plywood and some screws.
The procedure is as follows
- Cut a slit in the plywood through which the saw will pass. The slit can be made with a drill, drilling holes along the marking line and smoothing out the transitions. Instead of plywood, you can use other sheet materials: plastic, plexiglass, metal and others will do;
- mark and drill mounting holes on the plywood and the jigsaw base plate;
- fix the jigsaw on the plywood base plate with screws so that the saw goes through the slot;
- fasten the construction to the table with a clamp so that the saw is directed upwards. You can fasten the platform in any other available way.
Although the saw remains common for an electric jigsaw, thanks to the release of the hands of the possibility of sawing small parts expanded.
