Cheap Harbor Freight Heat Gun
In computer graphics, there is a series of books called "Graphics Gems" which may have been the inspiration for my garage series. They are usually really intelligent or clever bits of code that help you do interesting computer graphics tasks. My good friend Tom suggested once that a lot more interesting code was not really graphics gems, but more like "graphics gravel": not glamorous or clever, but nevertheless foundational and important.
With this in mind, I now have a second stream of posts in mind: Garage Gravel. These are tools which you won't really be upset about if you have to send them to the dump, but which you find useful and are glad to have in the moment.
A lot of Harbor Freight tools probably fall in this category. One that I have is a heat gun. I mostly use heat guns for doing shrink wrap, removing labels and occasionally trying to advance the drying of paints. Again, my needs are relatively basic, so I don't need anything fancy. I bought this very simple one from Harbor Freight, probably on sale.
Again, I think that this model is their cheapest possible model, and is in fact no longer one that they stock. I think I paid about $10 for it. Today when I reached for it to help remove a label, it made a clanky sound and then the fan stopped.
I immediately unplugged it, and reached for a screwdriver to see what happened. My guess was that something like a screw had broken loose and jammed itself into the fan of the gun. So, a little quick disassembly.
Note to self: the innards get hot really quickly, even though it ran for just a few seconds. But as I opened it, two small chunks of plastic fell out. Closer examination showed that the plastic that one of the screws which hold the two halves together had broken loose, and as I thought, had jammed into the fan.
Clearing the jam and reassembling did show that it was returned to working condition. I'm not 100% happy with the current state, as now the halves are held together by one fewer screws, and there is now a path where dirt or other foreign objects could more easily enter the case. I suspect that I'll continue to use it, but I suspect that perhaps I've gotten my $10 out of it, and maybe it should be retired.
Have a good one.