Things have been busy lately. I’ve been building a lot of electronic devices and since there’s soldering and assembly involved I’ve been looking seriously at my tools. In some cases I’ve bought new (and better) tools, and in some cases I’ve looked at making my own tools. Here’s a “Header Pin Snapper” that makes it easy to get a 14 pin header from a longer strip.
I used to use a diagonal cutter to snip the pins to length, and that works fine if you do a few, but if you need to do a bunch a tool is a quick way to do it. I’m not the first to make one of these, you can also check out the Header Snapper – WHSN, the BlueBreaker, this Pin Header Snapping Tool, and a parametric pin header snap fixture, among many others… including the OctoSnap!
So I spent a few minutes making this simple device that can snap pin headers to a length of 14 pins. Exactly what I need, and it works fast. Working fast is often better than working slow. I didn’t need an adjustable one, or a customizable one, so this one fulfills my needs, but might not be useful for others.
It’s just three pieces of 3mm thick acrylic, and four 3mm x 12mm bolts along with four 3mm hex nuts. I’ve got plenty of small scraps of acrylic lying around so made two just in case I misplace one.
