I finally have gotten a Dremel tool and am looking forward to experimenting carving and cutting wood with it. I have some clear pine to start with but there’s a place nearby where I can get some scrap exotic woods. I’m also thinking of doing some engraving on soft stones and maybe terra cotta too. I’m wondering what you Dremel owners use yours for and what attachments you find most useful. Do you have any photos or tips to share? Thanks!
At Home Depot the other day, I saw a Dremel kit for carving pumpkins. I am so going to try that out. (With my cheap battery-powered Dremel – I don’t really need pumpkin guts in my good one.)
I use mine to help me cope moldings. I am about 90% effective with a coping saw, but the Dremel let’s me buzz the pieces smooth and clean.
A lot of my Dremel uses are “misc”…as they don’t fall into any specific category.
A couple of times I used the blade sharpening attachment.
I love my Dremel. I have one bit of advice: wear safety goggles. Wear them whenever you use your Dremel, but especially if you use a cut-off wheel. Those things break up quite often and send miniature bits of shrapnel flying in all directions at a very high rate of speed.
I have used my Dremel to…
-Rout details in drawer faces.
-Remove rust from old vise-grips.
-Sharpen lawnmower blades.
-Shorten my dog’s toenails.
-Cut a hole in drywall.
-Cut through plaster.
-Remove grout.
-Cut a new slot in a stripped woodscrew.
-Cut sheetmetal.
-Shorten screws.
I use a dremel the same way I use vise-grips, when a better tool won’t work.
I most recently used it to cut off a frozen lug nut off of a wheel. My 4" grinder wouldn’t fit nor would my nut splitter. So out comes the dremel with the cut off wheel.
By the way, the reinforced cut off wheels are far better than the cheap ones. I broke several cheap ones before I realized I had a reinforced one. Problem solved.
Absolutely. I learned this the hard way. I was using one of the grinders on a piece of metal, and a piece of grit flew off and embedded itself in the surface of my cornea. I waited a couple days for it to work out on its own, but it never did, and the discomfort drove me to go see an opthalmologist to have it removed. Always Wear Safety Glasses!
I use mine to periodically scuff the rust off a gouge on the side of my car, while wearing safety glasses. (Then I repaint and the cycle begins again.)
Used mine the other day to remove the gunk from the old weatherstripping on my door threshold and prep the surface for the new strip.
One accessory that I consider a neccessity if you’re going to be using the Dremel for more than a few minutes at a time is a flex shaft. I hang my actual Dremel and use the flex shaft. It is a lot easier on the hands and wrist.
Boring out stripped bolts and screws and drilling teeny tiny holes, but mostly for carving work.
I use it for carving ivory (legal! I swear!), horn, soapstone, shell, wood, and plan on seeing how it does on alabaster/marble this winter. I also use it for engraving, and for drilling out handmade beads. I use it for cleaning and polishing jewellery as well. Too lazy to hand-buff to the degree required, and a full-size bench grinder is too big for what I make most of the time.
Yep, can’t recommend the flex-shaft enough.
Use a very very light hand - it’s easy to remove WAAAAAY more than you intended to.
Use a slower speed for bone, horn and ivory or you will burn the heck out of it, and the scorch can go deeper than you hope. 
For very fine detail, an inexpensive source of engraving bits can be had at the dentist’s office - just because a bit’s too trashed to work on live human teeth doesn’t mean it can’t be used on anything else.
If you’re planning on working shell, you should make a water table - it is generally recommended that shell be carved under a light skin of water. I’ve been told that the dust is particularly toxic. You can fake it with a clamped-down baking dish with just enough water in it to submerge the shell. This is also where you really really need the flex-shaft.
Soapstone doesn’t require lubrication to carve, but I’ve been told that the harder stones do, and that oil of wintergreen is considered suitable. I haven’t tested this out much yet though - too much fun with the organics.
While the safety glasses have been mentioned over and over, allow me to begin a similar refrain over DUST MASK DUST MASK DUST MASK. Can’t stress that one enough. Nunavut is going to lose about half its Inuit carvers some ten to twenty years early, due to the fact most of 'em don’t/won’t wear them. I usually use disposable painter’s masks.
Oh, man, I love my Dremel! I probably use it more than any other power tool I own - and I have lots of toys. I’ve used it recently for:
- cutting rusted bolts off the old A/C unit
- cutting out sheetrock for outlets and switches
- cutting baseboard (while it’s still on the wall) to install the entertainment center I built
- sanding small and hard to reach areas
- routing cabinet doors
- cutting stainless steel and plastic pipes when replacing a p-trap
and probably a hundred other things I’ve forgotten about.
I have the router attachment and the flex attachment. Both come in very handy.
My dad had one, and in my youth I used to take the promotional toys from McDonald’s and Burger King and gouge out their eyes and random body areas, painting on blood and weird tribal-looking markings and then gluing wisps of cotton on them. I’m not sure where I was going with this, but this thread just brought back fond memories.
Y’all are not even a little bit creative.
Halloween is coming… You can carve one hell of a cool pumpkin with a dremel tool and a pattern downloaded off the internet.
(It’s a bit of a pain to clean up all the teeny bits of pumpkin that go flying everywhere, but that stuff doesn’t hurt the dremel one bit.)
You don’t say?
I’d make sure the dentist sterilized them one last time before discarding them (and just to be sure, sterilize them again yourself).
I use mine mainly to do the dog’s nails, but I’ve also used it to polish brass.
Can I just ask how does one use the Dremel to do one’s dogs nails? Do you use the cut-off wheel for that? Do you actually “cut” or more or less grind 'em down?
You use the cylindrical sanding bands, kind of like a high-speed emery board. DoberDawn has a tutorial on her site:
http://homepages.udayton.edu/~merenski/doberdawn/index.html
Just click the How to Dremel Dog Nails on the left menu.
Thanks.
Dober Dawn likes her formatting, doesn’t she?