Over the years, we all amass a certain amount of home-made and retail tools that provide specific value to our projects.

On these tool pages, my goal is to simply highlight some of the frequently off-beat custom tooling that I have come up with, or to feature tools that I purchased that for one reason or another I found to fit the need.

For instance, in this picture we can see a custom vacuum press and a custom drill press table (both on the floor), my very simple "hot box" and my cheap lathe (standing vertically against the wall).  Some of these tools have their own dedicated write-up pages.

My "cheap lathe" was put together for making a Supra-style fuselage plug.

The write-up for the lathe can be found here.

When I built the lathe, I knew that I would be making some custom tail booms as well - so I made sure to size the lathe to fit the pool cue that would serve as my mandrel.

As detailed on my Kevlar Tubes page, the tailstock of my lathe served perfectly for wrapping up my Kevlar tubes.

Here is a small scale that I purchased that is really great for taking with me to the hobby shops.

It is exactly the right size to fit in my shirt pocket.

This scale is the AWS ACP-500.  It will weigh items between .1 and 500 grams. with a .1 gram precision.

In the picture you can see the 500 g. calibration weight that I purchased to keep the scale calibrated.