Edward Torre
The Fluke 1507 has become a default recommendation for electricians and industrial maintenance techs who need a dedicated megohmmeter rather than a multimeter with an insulation-testing mode bolted on. It’s not the cheapest way to check insulation resistance, but it’s built around a specific job — testing motors, cables, and transformer windings at up to …
A plasma cutter that lives in a truck bed or gets carried between job sites needs to earn its keep on weight and setup speed, not just cutting power. The good news is that most of today’s inverter-based plasma cutters have gotten genuinely light — many hover in the 13-20 lb range with a shoulder …
You don’t need a premium-priced name-brand plasma cutter to start cutting clean metal at home. A wave of budget-friendly 50-55A dual-voltage units has made it possible to get into plasma cutting at a budget-friendly price point, and several of them punch well above their price point on features like pilot arc starts, digital displays, and …
Cutting through a full inch of steel separates hobby-grade plasma cutters from machines that can actually handle heavy fabrication, trailer builds, and thick structural work. Not every “plasma cutter” on the market can cleanly sever 1″ mild steel — many top out around 1/2″ to 3/4″ before the cut quality falls apart or the duty …
Cutting metal art is a different job from squaring up structural steel. Instead of raw amperage, what matters most is control at slow, deliberate speeds — a steady hand tracing a curve, a torch that doesn’t stutter on a tight radius, and consumables that don’t burn through mid-design. Several plasma cutters now build specifically around …
A standard multimeter tells you whether a circuit is live, but it won’t tell you whether the insulation around a motor winding, a cable run, or a piece of switchgear is breaking down before it fails outright. A combination insulation resistance tester and multimeter closes that gap in one tool: apply a test voltage (typically …
Swap a manual pop rivet plier for a pneumatic rivet gun and the math changes fast: what takes a hard hand-squeeze and a few seconds per rivet on a manual tool becomes a single trigger pull with air doing the work. For anyone setting blind rivets by the hundreds — auto body panels, HVAC ductwork, …
Solid rivets aren’t set the way pop rivets are — there’s no pull-mandrel, no blind-side trick. A solid rivet gets driven with repeated impact from a pneumatic hammer while a bucking bar backs it up on the other side, upsetting the shank into a tight, permanent joint. That means the right tool here is either …
A rivet nut drill adapter turns a tool you already own into a rivet nut setter — no separate cordless gun, no compressor, no learning a new tool from scratch. Chuck the adapter into a standard electric drill (or a ratchet wrench for manual control), and the drill’s rotation drives the mandrel that pulls the …
A rivet nut gun solves a specific problem: you need a threaded hole in sheet metal or a tube that’s too thin to tap, and welding a nut in place isn’t practical. Squeeze a rivet nut (also called a rivnut or nutsert) into the hole with the right tool and you get a permanent, load-bearing …