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When I found out about the Worx maker X line of multitools I was extremely excited. Worx giving me a free set to review may have just pushed me over the edge!

They sent me the WX988 maker combo kit which comes with the rotary tool and soldering iron and uses the same battery pack all the Worx tools use.

Which is fantastic as I already have a whole bunch of Worx tools and really like them!

*Maybe I love Worx tools a little too much…*

Included in the kit is the usual battery and quick battery charger – I already have about 5 of these and they are massive but a smaller one is available if you want to consider making this a travel tool.

There’s the instructions of course. Worx always give a really good set of instructions.

And a lovely little tool kit of rotary bits for the rotary tool. There’s polishers, cutters, diamond burs and even some sanding tools and grinders – nice little start kit with most stuff the average crafter would need.

I’m already fairly stocked on bits though.

The main drive thingy itself, battery just pops in nice and simple and really light and really small even with the battery so potentially good for an everyday carry or camping gear. There’s a good 1.2 metre long cable on here and it looks like its braided too so should last even if you accidentally nick it with your tool.

The Rotary Tool

The rotary tool uses a 3 pin din style connector that’s keyed so you can’t plug it in incorrectly.

*The keyed connector so you cant plug it in wrong*

Much like similar tools out there has a button you can lock the spindle on to change the tool and a little chuck and collet. It looks like it fits the fairly standard 3.2mm or 1/8^th bits that most tools take and indeed that’s what it comes with, nice.

Sadly it doesn’t fit my Dremel collets due to the inside diameter of the tub but the thread however is the same as a Dremel so you could use a mini Jacobs chuck or switch out the collar.

Bits only need to be hand tightened but there is a flat on the chuck and a little spanner included to give it some extra grip if you need it.

It says in the manual it does 5000 to 35000 rpm which is again what you expect for this type of tool and the speed is controlled from this little knob here.

It’s a shame it doesn’t have a speed control or even an on/off control on the tool itself as you would normally be holding something in one hand and with the tool in the other. This is probably a feature I would pay more for if they had it available.

The power button releases the hounds! No it turns the thing on and off obviously.

Oh and its torquey, jumps in my hand and not surprising there’s a nice brushless motor inside that’s pretty powerful for its size.

Its light and its comfortable to hold too.

I also suspect this won’t be as powerful as my foredom by a long shot but….its not meant to compare with a tool like that and my big foredom is not easy to take those outside.

Oh I can just imagine now, child playing on the tramapoline and the wife bringing me a pimms while I do some carving in the garden on a hot sunny day…..

So thats exactly what I did; took it out to the garden to do some of the most relaxing power carving I’ve ever done!

*Power carving a Colin the Caterpillar Face in the Garden*

Not content with some wood carving I tried some diamond burrs and did a little rock carving! 🙂

Soldering Iron & Wood Burner

Now before I get carried away lets give the soldering iron a go.

Its not just a soldering iron I might add – it comes with some adapters that turn it into a little wood burning tool and comes with a few different shapes of nibs. Sadly they seem to use a different thread size to the standard weller bits but still this is pretty nifty.

The soldering iron tip it comes with is pretty good but it doesn’t seem to fit my standard Antex, weller or TS100 bits and Worx don’t seem to do a spare currently. Hopefully this is something they will do as without them, this thing is only going to last as long as the tip.

Oh comes with a little stand too, that’s nice.

Turning it on it does need another push of the button on the tool itself which is a nice little safety feature.

And oh that heats up pretty fast, it has a small display like many modern irons showing the temp and it can adjust it anywhere from 200 to 480 degrees C

It also comes with what looks like a silicon sheath for extra protection so I’ve popped that on. Bit fiddly to do but worth it as you can hold the iron for a lot longer.

Heat up time there was about 25 seconds to get to 200 degrees which wasn’t as fast as advertised but certainly that’s plenty fast. It took just under 60 seconds to get to the full 480 degrees c.

It cools down from 480c in about 10 minutes so it can be cold enough to touch the end again.

Swapping the bits out is as simple as unscrewing the bit, being careful with the heating element there and sliding one of the attachments on with the tip screwed in.

Nice.

So I can imagine if you don’t already have a soldering iron, maybe you have a small desk as your maker area this could be a really really nice system but where it really shines is taking it on the go. You could take it camping or just out in the garden or really anywhere you like.

So it’s a nice day, lets take this thing outside!

Here’s a little soldering project that I’ve been putting off for ages – suddenly the motivation to finish it while I sit in the sun with the birds chirping away its not so bad. It’s a plug that needs adding to this transformer so I can test out some LED panels.

Could do with a smaller tip but this is pretty good.

Summary

So my final thoughts on this tool system? Would I take it tomb raiding with me?

*Yes – I would take it on an adventure to find the lost ark*

Some of the downsides are the incompatibility with other tools or lack of spares but this is no biggy, the rotary tool will accept any 3mm bit you can think of and it wouldn’t stop me buying one if I needed to. If I had a choice though, I might give the soldering iron a miss just because of the lack of replacement tips at this time but at the same time it makes a good emergency or site soldering iron.

However, for what it is – I absolutely love it and while it’s no replacement for a top of the line soldering iron or my foredom it’s not trying to be and it works really well. I love that I could put a more powerful battery on and carve away for hours and I love that I don’t have to clean up my mess by carving outside.

Thanks you Worx for sending me this, I think during the summer especially its going to get a lot of use!

The Maker X system is out now on amazon and I’ve popped some affiliate links in this video description so please check them out. If you do end up buying one I get a tiny cut of the sale and you don’t pay any more – win win!

https://amzn.to/3w06oKB

If you have any questions for me or Worx on the product please pop them in the comments below or on my video and as always I’ll try to get round to answering every comment.

Hey people – I’ve been playing with 3D printed lithophanes and making these awesome photos come to life. This short tutorial post will go over the steps I made to create the Picard animated GIF in the video using 3D printed frames – a 3D printed animated GIF if you will!

You will need: Nothing!
If you don’t have a 3D printer you could always make these and get a 3D printing service such as 3D Hub or shapeways 🙂
You need a light source to shine behind the lithophanes but of course you could just use the sun 😉

So the concept of lithophanes has been around for hundreds of years. They were originally made of thin porcelain and would involve etching or molding artwork onto the substrate and shining a light source behind to reveal the artwork. Thinner areas let more light through and thicker areas less so with some skill some quite detailed images could be represented.

Only in recent years we’ve seen them 3D printed and people have figured out lots of ways of making them.

You can now make them directly in Cura or use your favourite 3D modelling package but I’ve been using this online tool by Mark Durbin. It’s available at:

3Dp.rocks/lithophane/

The tool lets you upload an image and it will directly process this into a STL file which you can download and print.

There are some basic controls for modifying the STL and choosing different shapes.

There’s the standard flat, curves both concave and convex, a solid cylinder, pillow shaped, dome shaped and even heart shaped.

Printing them needs to be done vertically as the bottom layer squashing can distort and lesson the effect. So once you have your image turned into a model, you may need to rotate it.

I’ve done a range of different thicknesses and found for normal ABS and PLA 3mm thick is optimal. Any less and you lose definition and anymore and light doesn’t get through the thicker parts.

Although I’m sure somebody has done it, I’ve not seen anybody do much with stop motion lithophanes yet.

Probably because there isn’t any logical reason to but hey, sometimes you just want to do stuff because you can.

And partly to celebrate the new Star Trek spin off Picard and partially because I needed something short to test I decided to use the classic Picard face palm meme!

Preparing the 3D Prints

First I used this nifty online tool EasyGIF to break the meme into separate images.

https://ezgif.com/split

There were about 39 in total but I only needed 27 of them to convey fully what’s going on.

I then manually imported and made STLs for each image.

And of course 3D printed them.

Preparing to Take the Photos

With all the Picard’s printed I needed some kind of jig so they could all be placed in the same place relative to the camera and I could run a little stop motion magic.

I was going to 3D print something complicated but a scrap piece of wood will do fine for testing.

Camera mounted one end with an elastic band.

I’m using a c920 logitec web cam here as it’s a great little camera for being able to adjust settings.

Pop the light the other end and the frame goes in the middle.

A little bit of experimentation was needed to get the thing just right. It took a while to play with the settings to get things looking good.

Contrast needed go up a bit higher so we can make out the detail and of course I needed to adjust the focus.

I put to make a mark on the wood where the base sits so I can make sure each one is in the same place.

And to make extra sure things stayed in the same place, I glued a little bit of wood onto the board. Now the frame can quickly push up against it.

I wasn’t too worried about it being slightly too left or right as this can be fixed in the software later.

Making the Animation

Now the fun job, lets take a photo of each of these 27 frames….

With the photos done I imported them into Adobe Premier. This is remarkably easy to do, just make sure your images have some kind of sensible number order as the filename.

In Premier go to import, select the first image and tick the Image Sequence checkbox. This will import all those images as a sequence you can then use just like any other video clip.

This sequence was 27 frames long which is just over a second of footage. To complete the circle I rendered it as an animated gif and again this is really easy to do in the latest versions of Premier, just select the Animated GIF option as your export format.

And there we go, happy Picard day everybody!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial or the video and I’d love to know what meme to do next. Maybe you can make one too?

Let me know if you do!

Oh and I’ve uploaded this to Giphy here:

So if you want to use it, please feel free!

And again remember to check out the video if you haven’t!