I bike to and from work every day, and one day as I was riding home I saw a man putting out a bed frame on his
lawn with a 'FREE' sign. I told him I'd be right back with my truck (actually a subcompact car but I treat it like a truck). I came back and loaded it into the trunk, as it'd be perfect for a bike trailer I'm working on. 1/8" angle iron, woohoo! The scrapyard no longer sells to small customers as they were recently bought out by an american company, so I need to get more creative with my metal acquisition.
While I was loading the frame into my car, the man mentioned he had more metal he was going to bring to the scrapyard and he asked if I wanted it. I said sure! So he grabbed a laundry basket full of metal objects and knick knacks and I took it too.
When I got home, I realized there was some good stuff in there. A lot of it was scrap, but there were some tools too! The first thing I noticed was a car jack. It was rusted and didn't move much, but it looked mechanically sound, at least to my eye. I also saw some brackets for hanging potted plants, some wind chimes with a cute kitty on them, and some rusted garden shears.
I'm off work with covid right now, so I have lots of time on my hands. Yesterday I got to work on cleaning stuff up. I didn't take photos of the process but I got the garden shears back up and running again. All I needed to do was remove the nut holding everything together, and add some oil to the moving parts. The spring had rusted away and snapped, but the shears are still usable and plenty sharp.
Then I got to work on the car jack. Here it is all rusty beside my Dremel.
And after some rust removal.
Then I tried it out on my car. It went about 1/3 of the way up, then everything got very squeaky and the handle was hard to turn. So the jack went into my vice, where I spritzed KL-13 (anti-rust/oil) on the threads and spun the handle.
Once the threads were moving freely and quietly, I tried it again on my truck. Success!
And don't worry, I chocked my tires incase the jack was not as functional as it looked.
The cat chime sounded great, but looked a little grimy. So I just wiped it down with a rag and some
water. Check it out!
Not sure what material it is. Not steel as there is no rust. Not aluminum as it is heavy for its size. Maybe silver coated something or other?
Finally, after doing a load of laundry I got out my drill and zip ties to fix up our old hamper.
Here it is cracked.
And a close up of one of the cracks.
Here I am drilling a hole at the end of the crack to stop it from spreading. This is something I learned from cast aluminum engine block repair of all things! All the folks on Youtube I watch repairing cast aluminum cracks always drill out the end of the crack to prevent it from spreading further. So I tried it on my plastic hamper, because why not?
Here I'm threading a zip tie through the two holes I drilled.
And here is the hamper all tied up! It isn't beautiful, but we will now get more life out of it before it completely breaks down. That is a success in my book.
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