 What is going on everybody? Welcome to Rotor Riot and welcome back to Learn FPV. This episode's going to be about the different tools and supplies that you'll need to build or work on a drone. It's probably going to be pretty short because you really don't need a whole lot. You could pretty much build a whole drone with a set of Allen drivers, a soldering iron, some solder, wire cutters, and electrical tape. But what I'll do is I'll go through each and talk about them a little bit and give you a little guidance on what you should look for in each one. So with your Allen drivers the sizes you're most commonly going to need are a 1.5 and a 2. You can usually find sets of four of these that are going to come with both of those. Sometimes they'll have a 2.5, sometimes they'll have a 3, but the one that we sell is going to have a 1.5, a 2.5, and a 5.5 nut driver. That's because on some frames they're going to use M3 nuts and this is the driver that goes for that. Speaking of drivers, you're also going to need something for the prop nuts. So you can use an eight millimeter wrench, you can use a socket. What I've actually found to use is this is a screwdriver I got at Harbor Freight and there's a removable head on here that you can flip around and be Phillips or Flathead similar to this one. But what I found is this actually fits the prop nut perfectly. So for me this is like two bucks I've been using it forever. There's also tools that are meant specifically for prop nuts. There's a bunch of different options out there, but you definitely need something to remove your prop nuts because you're going to go through a whole lot of props. Let's talk a little bit about soldering irons. A lot of people when they get into the hobby they're very scared of soldering, but soldering can be super easy. It can also be super difficult. The thing that's going to make it difficult is the things that you buy. So if you have a cheap soldering iron that can't get hot enough or you use the wrong or a poor quality solder it's going to be a miserable experience. You won't get the solder to melt properly and you're just going to have all kinds of problems. So look for a soldering iron that can do around 60 watts or more. It's probably wise to do a little research, look for reviews, or just go online and ask someone else what they're using. Not all irons that are rated the same act the same. So you kind of need to know that it's a trusted brand or at least that someone's used it and gave it a fair review. The reason the iron needs to be powerful is because even though it could be really really hot to the touch once you're trying to actually solder on to something whatever you're soldering to acts as a heat sink and it sucks all the heat out of the iron. You can also get portable soldering irons. We sell these in the store. These work really good. A lot of people don't even use their bench top soldering iron anymore. They just only use this. So this is called the TS100 and you can power it off one of your lipo. So there's a cable you plug into here, you plug in a battery, you hit the button and you're soldering. So this one for sure I can tell you does a good job. To go with the iron you need one of these metal cleaning thingies. I don't know exactly what this material is. It's like I'm not sure but if you look for soldering iron tip cleaner you can usually find one of these. These are important because the tip of the iron needs to always stay really clean. So you need to be really meticulous about constantly wiping it off. The tip of the iron should be really nice and shiny. If it's dark or it has corrosion on it that's really going to stop how much heat can transfer through that. So as you're soldering things you just constantly keep wiping it and keep it clean. You also need to make sure that you have the right type of solder. You don't want to use plumbing solder. You have to get solder that's meant for electronics and you also want a 60-40 blend. I can't remember off the top of my head what that blend is. I believe it's zinc and something else but it's not really important what it is. Just make sure you get a 60-40 solder or there's also 63-37. Either one of those two that's the right solder. To make it easy we can just put a link down in the description to the solder that I use because I know this stuff's good. So if you don't even know what soldering is and you're not sure how that works essentially what you're doing is you're taking the solid heating it up with an iron until it gets to a certain point and then it melts into a liquid. Once it cools off it goes back to solid. So this is just a way to make a connection between two pieces of metal and the way you do it is you don't take two pieces set them together and then feed this in. What you actually do is you tin each side of the wire. So what tinning is is coating this wire with the solder. So what you would do you heat up the wire with the iron and then on the opposite side of that wire you feed in the solder. So you basically like this. Hold the wire get solder on it and then you would do the same thing to the other side. So once both of these ends of these wires are coated with solder you can put them next to each other heat them both. It's going to form into a liquid cool down into a solid and they'll be connected. We already have a ton of build videos on the channel so you'll get more soldering tips there if you want to check that out. Another super common tool I use all the time is wire cutters. These are obviously to cut wires but I also use these as my wire stripper. So it takes a little bit of dexterity to strip the insulation off the wire without cutting through it but it's really not that difficult. So you could also just buy a wire stripper tool but this works really well. Depending on the thickness of it you can a lot of times just pinch it with your thumbnail and pull it off. But wire cutters definitely a good thing to have. Also sort of related to soldering is either tweezers or a small set of pliers. I usually use the pliers and what that's for is to hold on to the wire as you're soldering because the heat is going to transfer through that wire and it's going to get really hot. So sometimes if you're man enough you can hold on to it but I don't need to prove anything to anyone so I usually hold it with a set of pliers while I'm doing my soldering. I think that's basically it. Let me know in the comments if there's other tools that you guys use but this is pretty much all I ever use to work on my quads. Depending on if you have a weird design frame or some kind of bind and fly that comes with odd screws or something there may be other tools you need but for most everything I've come across some allen drivers, a phillips head, a soldering iron, wire cutters, tweezers or pliers that's pretty much all I ever need. Oh and the other tool that I didn't mention is this guy. So what this is, this is a heat gun. What the heat gun is for is for heat shrink. The way that heat shrink works is you can slide this over something and then once you heat it up it's going to shrink. So this is really good for just wrapping things up, keeping them isolated from other components like in particular the frames we use are carbon fiber and that's conductive. So if you have an electronic component sitting directly on carbon fiber it's probably going to catch on fire. So things I use heat shrink for are to cover my ESCs to go over my receiver and to mount my receiver antennas to zip ties. So speaking of zip ties it's a good idea to go out and get a big assortment of different sized zip ties. There's a ton of different uses for them. You can hold things down with them. You can mount antennas with them. I probably have zip ties in every quad I've ever built. Speaking of mounting another really good thing to have is some double-sided tape. I usually use this for my video transmitter and mount that down with tape but there's again like a lot of things a ton of different uses and you'll find yourself using double-sided tape all the time. Another tape I use on pretty much every build that you probably already have laying around is electrical tape. So there's a lot of different uses for it. You can wrap things up instead of using heat shrink to isolate it away from carbon fiber or other components. You can mount things down with it. I usually use electrical tape to hold my speed controllers down to the arm so I'll usually use a little bit of double-sided tape to stick them down and then electrical tape to make sure they don't come flying off. Another thing I like to keep on hand is some spare wire. So I almost never throw a wire away. Anytime I cut a little extra off I just throw it in a bin because you never know when you're gonna need it later. I've got some really thin gauge. I've got some thicker gauge and it's just smart to save because it's there's nothing more annoying than cutting a wire too short and you don't have any other wire to replace it. So you've got to order a wire and wait and it's it's like five cents worth of wire and you're wading through the mail and you probably paid five bucks to have it shipped. So I would definitely advise save your extra wire. It'll probably come in handy. The only other thing I have up here is some Velcro and this is kind of a different type of Velcro. This is called dual lock. So the difference between dual lock and normal Velcro it's the same on both sides and it's quite a bit stronger than normal Velcro. So I use these for my batteries. I just love that it's the same on both ends. It makes it handy because a you don't have to worry about using all of one side like this fuzzy side but you still have a bunch of the gritty side because it's all the same and then b when you end up with a bunch of batteries it's nice that they both have the same thing because you can pair them up together and it just makes carrying your batteries around a little bit easier. So I think that's gonna do it. Definitely like I said before guys let me know in the comments if there's other tools that new guys should get. This is just all I ever use so I don't I don't really know. Maybe there's something I'm missing out on that would make my builds easier. So that's gonna do it for this episode and the next one we're going to talk about the pros and cons in choosing a bind and fly drone or building one yourself. So thanks for watching and this is Learn to FPV.