Last weekend’s column – the part about the Chinese sailboat build? Well, that led to me mixing up another batch of Durham’s Rock-Hard Water Putty. And that – in turn – had sent me sneaking into the kitchen.
Elaine and I have very different ideas on recycling certain food containers. She looks at everything as a gift to be repurposed to an additional household use. My attitude – until we got this close to The End – was “Screw it – I will buy or build a parts bin…” You know that is still on the T0-Do List.
God help me if I throw out one of her clear plastic croissant boxes! She uses them for lots of things: For a small cleaning tray, cat food dishes outside (so our spoiled cats don’t scrape their whiskers on the cans, right?). For paint trays. And the list goes on.
She’s also great about saving jugs that OJ comes in and fruit juice containers. These get turned into disposable watering cans for small plants and to refill water for the cats. You seeing the picture?
I couldn’t help but notice that even her inventory of plastic egg cartons had overflowed. The voice in my head started screaming “PERFECT!!!!”
Egg Carton School? Seriously?
Step over to the fridge and tell me what you see:
Skip the best-by stuff. They won’t last that long. Point is this particular carton style (mainly for 18 eggs (Eggland’s Best) has three egg cups by six. More important is that the “secure top” type carton can give you little tiny cups. Which, as you can see here, get used around here for things like brown-sugar and borax poison for ants.
(This is in that retiled kitchen project from last year. Still looks great, but not so much with the ants…)
The tiny indentations from the top of the Eggland cartons are perfect, small and inconspicuous for ant bait.
As long as we’re in the fridge, we can see all sorts of ways to repurpose food containers for real shop work:
Elaine’s often crestfallen by my cavalier ‘tude toward pickle jars.
Way I figure it is this: Cleaned of their labels and mounted on a rotating board, they make it possible to spend large segments of shop time on organization that seldom pays off as a completed project. Organizers are only tools. Some people argue the point – from their disgustingly neat workspaces and I hate ’em. But I can usually get 3-4 projects done while they’re still “organizing to get ready to begin…”
Maybe I was in management too long? When I enter the shop, it’s like the wild West sheriff – I’m here with a Higher Purpose – right here and now – not to sweep sidewalks. Stay clear if you’re easily offended.
Which may explain why the shop isn’t as neat as Elaine keeps the House. There’s a kind of his/hers DMZ between ’em, although I have a carve-out in the Studio where it’s shared toys.
I grab egg cartons and ran for the door…
Safely in the Shop
On the hobby bench, a few minutes with the scissors and suddenly I was up to my Keester in free paint and mixing cups!
Glorious. A little crude looking, but they work, they’re fast, disposable and blah-blah-blah.
Then it Got Better
Turns out, one of the two egg cartons was the older style. The kind with a flat top. Oh, boy! Paint tray!
Well, EXCEPT there is wording on the inside of the egg carton. This is sprayed on with a water-soluble ink. I know: What the hell kind of people actually read the inside of egg cartons but let’s put that aside for now. They’re on social media not having real lives. Fact is, though, as all home handy bastards KNOW, there are many paints that will discolor off the water-based lettering ink.
Solution! Always ready with bottles of Grease-Away, Krud-Kutter, and 409 a little experimenting showed that with a 5-minute soak, this:
With a quick fingernail brush stroke or three becomes this:
Suddenly, I was awash in Nostalgia. One of the (thousands) of authors I have interviewed over the years – while not as famous has Richard (Illusions) Bach or James (Sports in America) Michener – did school me on her secret to super-fast and effective House Cleaning that she had written a whole book about.
“George, the secret to making quick cleaning of ANYTHING is to use the RIGHT solvent and the RIGHT temperature in the RIGHT amount.”
Sure as hell! That little secret has probably saved me more “Arm-Strong” and “Elbow Grease” than any other (non-shop) source I can remember.
Raise your right hand and repeat after me:
Next time you face ANY cleaning project, you’ll spend a moment or two thinking through your inventory of solvents. Paranoid men have gun safes. Practical (dangerous) men have solvent lockers.
Water is great, so is dish soap. Borax is wonderful, tri-sodium phosphate (*TSP) for things like wall-washing is better. Anything automotive may yield to Bug and Tar remover, bumper sticker remover, WD-40, diesel fuel, or that jug of alcohol used for cleaning the 3D printer tables between print runs.
Seriously: These are only your “getting warmed up” solvents. Feel the need for more speed, volatility, and cancer risk? Well…we can scale up from gentle to paint-stripping nail polish remover, to turpentine, gum spirits and mineral oil (surprisingly good on uncured epoxy on the hands (who knew?), lacquer thinner, ketone and relative MEK, and then we’re out to the welding table where NOTHING will stand up to an extended blast from the acetylene rig followed by the 8-inch disk sander. Except Space Shuttle heat tiles with lots of titanium in the mix.
Cleaning all depends on finesse, how much cancer risk you’re willing to table (Hint: we don’t live forever, and this week even that is looking dicey!) Sure, PPE (personal protective equipment) is useful and should be considered, too. Since my son is an EMT/communicable disease tracking firefighter with his OSHA-30 card and real serious wildland and structure fire experience between skydives, I even put in a “humor the boy” sign outside the shop. With an amateur grade PPE station inside….
PPE Notes
The welding skull cap goes on under the flip-up welding mask (which was replaced with a YesWelder clear view wide-angle). Keeps what little hair remains from catching fire.
Kitty corner from that is an Amazon box with a wide assortment of masks. Mostly we use N-95’s but some N100s are around for even more dangerous (think Fauci?) products. Ant mound power and such.
Boxes of nitrile gloves about. On them is a stack of specialized UV glasses.
Don’t know how much work you have done with lasers and with the photo-setting UV glues (some of which are AMAZING). But when you are gluing a strip of NIR UV lights into a “light crown” you’ll want the blue blockers on, for sure.
Tell you what – now that I’ve brought this topic up – how about we do a serious shoptalk column next weekend on safety and prepping?
Lawn Blocker
Sam, the Siamese of undetermined gender, is still guarding the tractor.
Yes, the left front tractor tire of the rider is what he’s nestled into. Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.
I’m going to slip him another can of food to stay put. Vacation from lawn chores has been nice!
Write when you get rich,
George@Ure.net
“Elaine’s often crestfallen by my cavalier ‘tude toward pickle jars.”
For storing small items/parts in jars attached to a rotating board via lids screwed to the board, I’d recommend against using glass jars (from experience). Cleaning up a bunch of tiny nuts/bolts mixed with glass bits on the work bench is no fun at all, even with a magnet. Plastic jars work much better.
Good point, but I keep ALL the glass containers I get, since I generally get very few, They’re great for cleaning small parts with harsh organic solvents that would eat right through plastic. I’ve not figured out how to personally recycle glass and make something useful beyond what little I learned in chemistry classes, but the relative inertness of glass is often very useful. Metal cans may work for some solvents, but unless you buy coffee in cans, they’re rare items too. BTW, I toss the thin plastic juice/milk containers since they will biodegrade and leak after a few months. I lost 1/2 gallon of used antifreeze that way. Just keep original oil and antifreeze containers. They should be good for 10 years if kept out of the light. Most cheap plastic does degrade with light and get brittle, to the point that it will crack easily.
One real problem is storing these things! Best done in a shed that’s good for little else.
As the Fox noted this weekend’s touchdown of Marine 1 upon the migratory grounds of the loon “On Golden Pond” (1981), a little birdie of solvent thought went off in my mind. Is the First Couple doing a remake at Rehoboth Beach of the Fonda/Hepburn classic? Wow, good times.
Play it, Sam! “As Time Goes By”.
That is a Blue Point Siamese cat. Mom always had 2 or three Siamese cats around. The darker ones are seal points and they were the nastier ones. They would always just look at you and hiss and a couple would bite. The blue points always were laid back and cool.
Egg cartons also make very good seed starters.
But they cluck… lol
Sam seems happy! I’m glad. Great picture though!
It stopped raining for a day, so perhaps I can get a bushhog back together and functional. The “grass” here is three feet high!
One of the things I’ve pounded into my kids’ heads since they were toddlers is:
Water cleans. Soap does not. Soaps and detergents are made up of chemicals which make water “wetter” and make dirt “less sticky” but it is the water itself which does the cleaning.
The concept is so incongruous with what people see, that it’s a hard one to wrap one’s head around. My kids are in their 30s now, and I’m not sure any of ’em get it, yet.
Soap is essentially oil or fat that’s been rendered in an alkali bath. Bar soap is rendered in lye (sodium hydroxide); soft soap is rendered in potassium hydroxide.
Detergents are essentially calcium carbonate (washing soda) and sodium tetraborate (20 Mule Team Borax) mixed in various ratios. “Detergent boosters” are relabeled soda and borax (go read that Oxyclean label…) Until the late 1960s, laundry detergents had trisodium phosphate added to the soda/borax mix (remember the “Tide,” “Cheer,” and “Salvo” “whiter than white” commercials from the early ’60s?) TSP worked too well, and made Lake Michigan bubbly as Wisconsin pumped it full of used water, so “phosphate-free detergent” was born. TSP disappeared for several years, then resurfaced, because it was an absolute requirement for proper cleaning before exterior housepainting. (I dunno if it still is, but) this is why you can find it in your hardware store, but not in your “All” detergent…
I believe that TSP was also removed from dishwasher detergent, resulting in dingier washes.
Of course, you can get it from the hardware store and add it back. For cleaning concrete prior to serious painting(like a swimming pool), it’s absolutely necessity.
The box stores are trying to avoid it and sell TSP substitute, whatever that is.
One bar of coarsely powdered Fels Naptha soap mixed with one cup each of Borax and Washing Soda makes a great detergent. I’ve used it for years and been very satisfied with the results. Only 1-2 tbsp. of the mixture is needed per load of laundry. I make 8-9 batches at a time and store it in one of those large plastic detergent jugs that has a handle and a pouring spout, periodically transferring some to a smaller container that’s easier to use.
There are many versions of this recipe with varying amounts of Borax and Washing Soda. Another variant uses a bar of castille soap instead, but I think Fels Naptha is a better stain remover. FN has usually been inexpensive and available only at Walmart, but the price may have gone up considerably recently, along with the price of everything else.
“Elaine and I have very different ideas on recycling certain food containers. She looks at everything as a gift to be repurposed to an additional household use. My attitude – until we got this close to The End – was “Screw it ”
get rid of the GOOD CHINA….who ever heard of it.. LOL
My fathers prize posession was a solid gold rolex watch that was given to his great grandfather for working thirty years in a steel mill..
when he passed on.. the Rolex watch was passed down to.( as was the wedding band of the first person ever married on the shores of the USA… YUP solid gold to..when I got a divorce from the first wife.. that wedding band went with never to be seen again). I thought dam what a beautiful watch.. and heavy..I put it in a drawer for safe keeping..
then we went through the year without an income.. I was still in a wheel chair and working at learning how to walk again.. and a friend would come a pick me up every couple of weeks and get me out of the house..on one of those ocassions.. I had the thought after there was a commercial of jewelers buying antique watches.. well an old watch.. lets see.. so we stopped by the jewelers and I asked.. well you know my father inherited his grandfathers gold rolex watch.. the eyes perked up.. do you have it.. no but would it be worth anything.. I would pay you x amount without even seeing it.. now this got my attention.. we definately needed the money.. so my friend takes me home.. I went to the drawer that I kept my most precious items in…opened it.. Toilet paper tubes.. HUH… HONEY.. were did you move everything to.. and why toilet paper tubes.. OH the kids are going to have you help them make castles for school projects..
IT WAS GONE… she said she moved it someplace else.. my guess is it went into the round filing bin.. LOL LOL I still have the engineers carbide lamp and the engineers watch.. but the gold rolex.. gone LOL LOL LOL….I was disapointed but nothing for me to worry about some one some time in the future will be doing an archeological dig.. and maybe come across it..
Wait! You’re still married? LOL
Elaine and I settled that one long ago. I don’t touch here stuff and she doesn’t touch mine, lol.
We cracked open the Grandpa’s Pomegranate, for a sip last night.
You need to be brewing custom wines and spirits. Then take all the money you make at that and buy a couple of gold rollies.
Or, if you get acquired because your bevs are pure genius, sell out to a corporation and then who needs to know the time, anyway?
If you caN figure out a legal way to sell Grandpa’s wines on here, you got free ads, buddy!
Yup LOL LOL LOL LOL IT WAS A SHOCK THOUGH.. the watch is a thing.. and things come and go and can be replaced LOL LOL she just assumed it was old crap.. she knew that I loved it LOL LOL .. what she kept was the ten dollar walmart watch that was still in the box LOL LOL LOL
I am glad you enjoyed it.. dropped a few bottles off yesterday to friends.. one sells bread made in a wood smoke oven and eggs…. and we are going to share.. the other ladies are just supporting people with cancer in our area monetarily… I actually like making wine.. it is fun.. I am going to get some grapes from where they make don perignon Rose.. and see if I can replicate it…. took a while for me to figure out how to do it so it doesn’t come out like diesel fuel LOL LOL LOL through away more batches than I wanted but it was a learning experience…. That is why I won’t give any of the wild grape away.. it tastes smooth.. real smooth great flavor.. but has a kick like a mule.. the stuff started to ferment after I bottled it.. did that three times.. I don’t have a clue what the end alcohol content is in it first time around it was just at ten percent.. it is great tasting.. but wham.. I am not a drinker and had just two little cups.. ( three ounce ) and It kncked me on my but.. and I had a hangover to boot.. i had to pasteurize it to stop the fermentation.. phew.. my son in law thinks it is the best stuff ever.. came from grapes from his fathers vines.. other wise I think I would dump it…
thing is.. we can enjoy what normally some rich dude has the opportunity to enjoy.. and not have it cost us an arm and a leg.. I won’t be making that though until the mead of RA is done.. I can’t wait for it.. Just about have enough bottles now.. to start making another batch…
ROFL!
furniture water marks LOL to remedy any cloudy residue in the finish of wood furniture. Using a paper towel, dab mayonnaise onto the stain. Let it sit for a few hours or overnight with the paper towel on top. Wipe away the mayo with a clean cloth and finish by polishing. walaaa!
another is.. the same but use a low heat iron and mayonnaise.. To remove water rings with an iron, start by putting a light coat of mayo on the area to get rid of the ring.. then laying a clean cloth over the mark. using a cotton cloth without any prints or decals to avoid any transfer to your surface. lay the iron on there for a couple of seconds.. then lift it up.. the oil in the mayo.. mayo is like margarine it is spun oil but is spun oil egg and lemon juice.. the oil displaces the moisture damage from the cup ring..
plastic is spun oil to..they are all real close in chemical makup.. just a couple ingredients different on each of them… which is why they will tell you don’t use plastic in the microwave oven.. the oil leaches into the food.. and the PCB’s can be cancer causing..
This is off topic, but definitely important to resolve one way or another:
https://youtu.be/GJpYLDSXTaA
This is about UV-C reaching the ground in increasing amounts, probably due to ionospheric manipulation. We’re in need of hard data. I don’t have the equipment to determine the spectral composition of impinging sunlight, but perhaps someone here does, or has more info to add. I’ve noticed a burning of my skin in May, June and July during recent years, so I avoid the sun at peak times then. I also try to keep my nicer car in the garage during those months. Trees and crops seem to be adversely affected, and differences can be seen in mountain forests depending on the exposure. Farmers are using more shadecloth. These are datapoints, but there’s obviously something going on. I still have in mind the suspicious closure of the Sunspot observatory in NM – a place with solar observation as it’s prime mission. That was never properly explained. Perhaps that’s yet another breadcrumb in trying to understand 2025 “Chaos”. Good historical data regarding this is also important.
The solar observation satellites are so good that they have made the ground based observation obsolete.
https://solarham.net/
There is a “solar flux index” that indicates the amount of excitation we get to the ionosphere for radio propagation. I do not know if it has a breakdown for UV-C or if it is a wideband measurement… which should also indicate some increase. I don’t have a link to any historical data on this, though.
Hello NM Mike,
You are over the rabbit hole. Keep following it. I posted not too long ago on the high UV rays now 11 on a used to be 1-10 scale, and UVC burning crops and splitting trees on the sun side because they are destroying the protective Ozone layer from rockets and climate geo-engineering. Not cans of aerosols by individual humans.
Sunspot, NM raid by FBI was well-noted. Been there several times. As you know, it is above Alamagorda/Holloman AFB where Ike met the aliens. They passed the raid off as a possible spy operation being interrupted. Like the Chinese were spying on Holloman. How about certain incomings being shown by the sun, of which other pictures are out there. Take care…hooray for the monsoons.
The box store had a sale on Pringles snak paks made for kid’s lunches, etc. The little plastic cups they package the chips in have become seedling starters. I’m still waiting for my pepper seeds to sprout. Been soaking on damp paper towel in a “plastic croissant tray’ atop a S-pole magnet for a long time now, and still nary a sprout. Must be tough seeds. I’m told they will sprout and grow even from the frozen peppers. Patience.
My most-used chemical cleaner/solvents are alcohol, gasoline, kerosene, ammonia, vinegar, acetone, TCE (Brakleen), toilet bowl cleaner or “TBC” (specifically “The Works” original thin. It is hydrochloric acid in water, in a perfect ratio to efficiently eat oxidation off of metal), Borax, and soda. Every once in a while I come across something for which I have to use ether or chloroform, but not very often. TCE, TBC, and gasoline, in that order, are probably my faves…
“,,,,and Donald J. Trump should immediately relocate outside of the United States.” G A Stewart
– Interesting thought.