Hypodeemic Nerdle?

Gareth,

I dispose of a 0.25 mm needle every day, even the device I screw it to must have a use if I could get it apart, I offered and asked but nobody can think of uses.

Delivering small quantities of lubricant to mechanisms? Injecting glue into furniture joints to repair without having to take the piece apart

Syringes are often used to demonstrate the basics of hydraulics

Andrew

I use 'used' insulin syringes when mixing minute quantities of two-pack paint for touching up mistakes. occasionally they get used for such things as injecting thin oil into difficult to access areas and injecting nitric acid into holes when dissolving unwanted sheared off steel from aluminium holes.

A (big??) problem with the modern disposable 0.3ml and 1ml disposable syringes is that the 30SWG needles are too fine to pass anything much thicker than water and the lubricant on the pistons is dissolved by many organic solvents, to either the fluid won't pass or the pistons seize.

One solution for things like 2-pack paint and oil is to chop the needle off with a wood chisel, leaving a somewhat larger hole.

I've still got one Rocket 1ml and one Everett 2ml glass syringe from the days when we kept them in industrial spirit and boiled them up when we remembered, but I don't want to spoil them!

As for disposing of the sharps, it's a ruddy nuisance. The doctors and hospitals don't really want them and the council expects you to fill up a sharps box once a week. I wait until I've got half a gallon, then melt them down into a solid block in old paint, soup or bean tins. I reckon they're probably fairly innocuous at that point.

Bob,

I thought of things like that but the only way I can get my pen apart is by breaking it.

Martin P

My doctors take them willingly and the council collect when ever I need them collected.

Martin P

I have been looking at this post for months giggling to myself without commenting,I have now started to call the thing a Hypodeemic Nerdle and people think I am mad.

Well, I've now 10 of them, and altho' only 2mL each, as a water pistol, they shoot 20 feet, so I was musing at the possibility of a water-based Gatling gun, whereby water would be drawn in at the bottom and fired out at the top, as the barrel rotated?

They are also useful for mixing very small quantities of epoxy. I keep a selection of sizes to suit the amount being mixed.

Henry