TS-100 soldering iron battery adaptor by Spudd1

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

This is a adaptor for some old "Axminster.co.uk"-own-brand 18v lithium iron batteries I had (Axion branded) so that together with this design, would become not only a portable power supply for the TS-100, but also a soldering iron stand.
I already had a Makita LXT battery adaptor for the TS100 soldering iron, it was made up from a couple of designs from Thingiverse (one of which I modified) but I wanted to design and build another as my present one has no way of turning off the power without pulling the power connector from the iron.
The TS100 soldering iron is really good, and when supplied with 18v it heats up in 4-5secs from cold. Often when making projects, I need to solder for a moment, but then don't need to solder for a while, so it would be really handy to be able to easily be able to put the TS100 back into standby mode. So in this design I am putting a microswitch inline with the power so that it is really easy to "click" it when putting the iron back into the holder/stand, when it's not going to be needed for a while.
1st of 4 videos of the design process here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JzmXg0SMOU (other parts will be linked in the video description) Part 1 - In this video we start on the design process in Fusion 360 of an adaptor for an "Axion" 18v drill battery (own-brand of Axminster Power Tool Co, UK, from 15yrs ago) to power a TS100 low-voltage Soldering Iron and also to be a holder/stand for it.
I must emphasise that this is NOT intended as a Fusion 360 tutorial, I am woefully unqualified for that!! As you will see in this series, I will no doubt make a whole bunch of mistakes, but hopefully we can all learn a little something from the process.
This is simply one way to measure up an existing part in order to make a matching part.
I've also uploaded the fusion file if you want to adapt to your particular battery brand
EDIT 27/03/2021: added Fusion file