Hot Air Gun Holder

I made a nice metal holder for my Hakko 851's nozzle. The 851 can take a while to heat large ground planes, unless you crank up the heat and risk burning the board. This holder frees me from the tedium of having to point the nozzle at some stubborn SMD inductor for few minutes.

The holder is assembled from $18 in generic parts from aliexpress. They're all some sort of stainless steel, excepting the thumbscrews which are clearly aluminum. The base is a 10x16cm piece of scrap 16ga 304 SST. The cuts were marked with a transfer punch (haha), made with a hacksaw, and deburred with a dremel. Four holes were drilled and tapped to M3 for the flange.

While tapped sheet metal might seem flimsy, 16ga is thick enough to engage three M3 threads. This is a best-practice minimum which provides around 70% of the strength of a nut. After screwing the flange to the baseplate, excess thread length was removed with a dremel cutting wheel and then brought flush with a grinding wheel. The bottom surface was sanded to a passable finish.

The shaft thumbscrew has a small bit of copper wire glued to the end of its thread to avoid marring the shaft. It doesn't slip vertically at all but it actually allows you to pivot the nozzle without loosening the shaft thread, which makes it easy to remove heat.

The threaded coupling connections are fixed with blue loctite. In theory the nozzle's heat could destroy the loctite, but in practice the knurled coupling nuts stay cool to the touch at all times. This is mostly because the nozzle's root doesn't get very hot to begin with. The nozzle-release thumbscrew is in direct contact so it does get hot after some time. I've burned myself on it!

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