Handy home made disassembly tool

I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of this, but I'll share it anyway.

The other day I decided to pull apart my C78. This light, like many I guess, has 2 small cutouts in the aluminium heatsink which are used to unscrew it.

Since I didn't have a suitable tool to do this, I decided to make one out of a flat washer.

Simply grind half of it away, or cut it in half with a hacksaw and file the edge flat so it looks like the one on the right.

Hold it in a pair of pliers, and there you have it.

The cutout in the middle means there's plenty of clearance between the tool & the emitter.

Interesting.... interesting... very interesting

Thanks for your idea!

I've always used circlip pliers for this purpose, this looks like a better approach for most uses.

I use my eyeglass repair tools to take the pill out. It comes with tiny flathead screwdrivers that fit very well into the cutouts.

First I start off with my small hammer, then the medium hammer, then the big hammer, and for really tough jobs I bring out Big John which is my sledge hammer. Oh and lots of duct tape. :D

You can also get a bunch of tweezers from DX for cheap. Pretty good for this kind of job.

And all sorts of other jobs - definitely a good idea to get a few pairs. DX have probably every variety of tweezer you'd ever want.

http://www.dealextreme.com/search.dx/search.tweezer

Sadly they don't do haemostats which are also incredibly useful.

And all sorts of pliers - the more the merrier. Since you aren't about to apply huge force to anything inside a torch even the cheapest ones will be just fine.

Ages back I did put together a list of useful tools.

Enough links for you Vectrex?

;)