Oddest thing in your toolbox?

Spray paint works for this too.

Squeeze bottle of mustard.

Supposedly the 'final net' soulution may not work anymore. They may have changed the composition.

My favorite for installing stuff like that is alcohol.

Jim

Try compressed air. Use a gun with a small nozzle, slip it into the gap between the grip and the bar as best you can, wiggle a bit until you get some inflation, and you'll find that the grip will slide along nicely. I did this the other day with some foam grips that didn't even have an end cap, it still worked perfectly.

Wayne

Ah yes, "magic jumping grease", isn't it? Open the tube, the room gets coated?

| >

| >"GrumpyOldGeek" And I thought I was kinky when I used it to slide new grips | >on my motorcycle handlebars... | >^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ | >Whatever turns you on, baby. However, I am not sure that is the best | >product for this use, or the best use for this product. I use something | >like hair spray for installing grips--it's slippery when wet, but not after | >it's dry. | | Supposedly the 'final net' soulution may not work anymore. They | may have changed the composition. | | My favorite for installing stuff like that is alcohol. | | Jim

I'm really fond of isopropyl alcohol, which on rubber and similar materials is very slippery but evaporates completely when no longer needed. Denatured doesn't do quite as good a job. Rubbing alcohol, which has lots of water, doesn't do it, though. Straight iso.

"ff" wrote: Squeeze bottle of mustard. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ And what do you use it for....drilling, tapping or eating?

Heh. My favorite story involved a lab cheapskate who wanted to waterproof his leather boots. He was too cheap to go out and just buy some bear grease made for that, but instead swiped a big tube of DC silicone grease and used that.

Apparently he developed the biggest case of foot-rot because the silicone grease completely prevented the leather from breathing at all.

Jim

"B.B." wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news-ia.supernews.net:

Lipstick. If you have a sticky collet in a screw machine, it works every time, just put a little on the taper. Grease washes away, lipstick sticks. It also works on 5C spin indexers and screw type collet closers. I also have weed whacker string (monofilament line) for lining up bar feeders.

I've heard, er, rumors (yeah, that's it) that Dow Corning optical grease (as used to couple photomultiplier tubes to scintillation crystals) is a right bitch to get off of, say, the windshield of a particularly annoying coworker. The more he wiped, the worse it got.

Hypothetically, that is.

Heh. I think the approved method is to boil in NaOH solution.

Tough to get a beaker that big.

Jim

When we had to clean the grease off the crystals, we used isopropyl and some really nice lint-free cloths, and a LOT of elbow-grease. The glass on the crystals, however, had a much better polish (and was quite a bit smaller) than his car's windshield.

Wish I had a few boxes of that cloth...

There's a story about those lint-free cloths too.

Seems like there was a wafer fabrication facility that used them. Actually used a lot of them, really. Their annual budget for them was a few million dollars.

Then one of the guys on the line got the idea, that they could use them twice - once on each side. He submitted it as a suggestion, and it turned out they could indeed do that.

He saved the company about a million dollars per year. Basically by using both sides of the rag. :)

The nice thing was they had the policy that anyone who did that, got a sizeable cut of the savings.

Jim

Yup, GE used to do that too - called it the "Business Driver" program. (no clue why the name but they had a racecar logo so it looked good on the shirts or something). They discontinued it because, among other reasons, there was a bored third-shift tech who kept turning in things like "part number (xyz) has the same function as part number (abc). abc is an off-the-shelf commodity product, part (xyz) is custom-machined. We could save (real number - with 5 digits) per year, based on a (number) of scanners per year, by switching the 3 instances of (xyz) to (abc). This is without considering possible quantity discounts (etc etc etc)"

They'd counter with "changing the bill of materials would cost (blah), and we have a contract for (xyz) which would cost (blah) to break, so shut up and go away", and then do it anyway a while later.

After a few of those, I stopped participating.

Good tapping oil dispenser. After I finish off the mustard :-)