There are a few extra attachments you can
get – magnifying glass, fan, and light are all
common. Magnifying glasses can be useful for
fine work, but we find that only the rod-and-joint-
style third hands are capable of holding work still
enough to be useful for this level of fine work.
Of course, depending on your eyesight, you may
find magnifying lenses more or less useful.
Whether or not a light is useful to you will depend
on your workshop lighting.
Since switching to
lead-free solder, we’ve
found soldering fans
to be essential parts of
our desktop. Even with
leaded solder, there are
quite a few fumes given
off, and that stuff is not good for your health.
With all that in mind, we set off to find
our perfect third hand on a direct-from-China
website to see what it would cost.
We got a NEWACALOX Multi Soldering Helping
Hand Third Hand Tool from the NEWACALOX official
store on AliExpress for £20.93, including delivery
to the UK, and set out to do some soldering.
The arms do have a certain wobble in
them, but no more than we’d expect for fully
flexible arms, and the number of arms means
you can double up to minimise this.
The fan is a computer fan with a USB connection
that has an M3 bolt through one corner, attaching
it to one of the arms. This has the advantage of
making it easy to position in the most effective
place for your particular piece of work, but it has
the downside of feeling quite flimsy. The USB
cable isn’t particularly long, so you’ll either need a
power source very close by, or a USB extension
lead. We put our laptop on our desk and used
that, but for more regular use we’ll splice in a bit
more cable to make it long enough to be useful.
The crocodile clips are covered in heat-shrink
tubing to protect the component being held, and
plastic covers on the
arms. The latter are
prone to falling off, but
this doesn’t matter as
they don’t do anything
anyway. Overall, the clips
are big enough to hold
most things we want
to solder, and firm enough to hold them securely.
The base is just heavy enough to hold itself
in place. Any lighter and we’d worry about
it moving about too much. We would feel a
bit more confident if it were heavier, but we
haven’t had any problems with it in use.
The base includes recesses that can be used to
hold components, but we find it a bit fiddly to use
them, as the arms are quite close together and you
risk knocking them when trying to pick something up.
Having external component bins works far better.
Overall, this third hand is a great tool for
soldering with, especially if you hack the USB
cable on the fan to be a bit longer. Fortunately,
we’ve got just the thing to hold it in place
while we solder up the new cable.DIRECT FROM
(^) SHENZHEN
Left
The plastic pads
on the handles are
prone to coming
off, but they’re not
functional anyway
The arms do have a certain
wobble in them, but no more
than we’d expect for fully
flexible arms
”
”
FIELD TEST