I am sure we all have at least one of these. An item that is used for many things but was not what the item was made to do.
I don’t even know what my item is. It looks like a very long pair of salad tongs. It is three foot long and completly made of wood except for the bolt that holds the two peices together.
I want to say it for fireplace log placement but being all wood it would catch fire pretty easily. There are also no ridges between the tongs nor are they curved. It is flat so grabbing a log would be harder than just using a poker of some sort.
Well in our house this is known as The Grabber Thingy. Its main purpose is to grab things that have fallen behind couches, a dresser or the TV. It is also good when installing new electronics in a TV stand or entertainment center. When you push that speaker wire or electric cord through the little hole in the back The Grabber is used to well grab the wire. This way you don’t have to pull the stand away from the wall. Quite the handy tool.
I have no clue what it was initially supposed to do but it works great for our needs.
I use my electric leaf blower/vac to assist in mopping the floors. I just throw a bucket of water and cleaner on the tiles, scrub with a stiff broom and then blow the water down the drain with the leaf blower. Cuts the time in half at least.
I use a knitting needle to reach into my wood burning stove and mess around with the logs. There’s probably a real tool for that, but using whatever you have handy is the Bulgarian way.
I can’t think of any personal examples, but Kyla’s Bulgaria comment reminded me of how impressed I was at how inventive the Vietnamese are at this kind of thing.
When I was riding a motorcycle there, I caught a flat, so pushed my bike to a little old guy at the side of the road. He hauled out the inner tube using blunted nails to remove the tire. Then he produced a Robe Goldberg contraption he’d made out of a stub of wood, a clamp, and the cylinder out of a car engine. He put rubber and cement over the puncture, then poured gasoline into the cylinder, and lit it. He used the clamp to push the now hot cylinder down onto the piece of wood, and the flat surface and heat “cured” the repair. Another time the selector in my gearbox went and I could only get into first or second gear. Another roadside dude dismantled the gearbox, found a broken spring, and replaced it with one he made on the spot with a pair of tinsnips and a bean can. It worked like a dream.
Finally, in the Mekong Delta, there was a guy cruising around in an old US swiftboat (or something like it - a little smaller I think). Where the machine gun had been, he was using the stand to hold and articulate a very long fishing rod.
I’ve got a synthsiser running off the power unit from a toy train set. My laptop is currently held with the keyboard at my preferred typing angle by the use of two cassette-tape boxes (still containing their tapes). My pupils stare at me in disbelief when I tell them a bank or library card is the key to handwriting music, and I have to demonstrate how it’s a great miniature straightedge, with both horizontal and vertical sides reducing the need for rotation. And so on.
Er… I don’t know? I just found that paintbrushes (the little ones for artistic purposes, not the ones you’d paint walls with, obviously) are really good for applying eyeshadow.
i use an ice cream stick to hold open a book while i read with one hand, with my thumb resting on the stick, holding the book open for easy viewing. it also serves as a bookmark.
When the autumn leaves start to cover my lawn, I set my lawn mower on “mulch” and go over the lawn. It grinds up the leaves and feeds the lawn. Of course this doesn’t work so well when the leaves are a foot deep.
I use 35mm film canisters to hold just about anything . . . from paint to pins to pills.
I have a stand-alone toilet in my studio . . . as a wastebasket.
My dear great aunt, aged 88, has a hearing aid and arthritic fingers, which means she drops the little batteries all the time. She has therefore dismantled an in-ear headphone to expose the magnet, and uses this, dangling on the end of the wire, to pick up her misplaced batteries.