Rotary Tooling

Quite a while ago we bought a rotary tool. Despite my excitement over now having one at my disposal, I didn't do anything with it. That's recently changed, as I now seem to pull it out all the time! Usually, this randomly occurs to me around 8:30pm on a week night, so I don't have "before" pictures of these projects.

Rotary tool with cutting and sanding attachments.

The first project I attempted was cleaning up this metal moose ornament. I got it in 2011 as a souvenir from Yellowstone, but when I pulled it out the next Christmas, the coating was flaking off and making a mess. I put off dealing with it because I was afraid it would make even more of a mess. For a sanding project, I would definitely recommend a mask, as I ended up with dust up my nose. I used a sandpaper tube attachment, and now all the flakiness is gone. However, while it's clean and smooth, it doesn't look very attractive, so I've still got to figure out what to do with it. A trip to Hobby Lobby is in order.

Next I trimmed about a 1/4" off the top of this pen tube. It was tapered and I wanted both ends to look the same. It's only a 1/4" in diameter, but I was concerned about using the rotary cutting discs because they look like really stiff circles of sandpaper; could they really cut anything? Turns out, they can, but it makes a bit of a mess if you are cutting through plastics, and I definitely recommend safety glasses to avoid getting bits in your eyes.

I've had this pen since I was a kid, and, even when it no longer wrote, I kept it because loved it. However, I still have no idea how I'm going to turn this tube into a useful memento.