Don't drop your peanut into a can of stain

C

CoffeeCat2112

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Yeah, so I was in the garage with my smooth Chestnut bone/SS peanut out, fiddling around and doing a couple little projects. In a moment of dexterity rivaled only by Gerald Ford, I fat-fingered the 'nut into an open, almost full quart of walnut woodstain. It took about 10 minutes, but I fished it out with a screwdriver and putty knife. My little brown nut had a nice coat of bottom-of-the-can stain sludge all over/inside it. :grumpy:

I've spent the past hour with hot water, soap, oil, paper towels, and toothpicks cleaning it. It appears to have not altered the bone color at all (although I wouldn't have minded if it turned out a bit darker, really), but that stuff got in between all the springs, liners, etc. What a mess! I think I got most of it now, but it's in a hot soapy soak one more time to be sure. Living in a townhouse, I don't want to run the air compressor in the garage right now, as it's pretty noisy, but in the morning I'll give it a shot of air to blow out the last of it.

Lesson of the day: Peanuts are stain resistant.
 
I just took it out of the soap bath, dried it out, blew out the channels manually (orally?), and oiled it. Paper towels come out clean now. Dumbest thing I've yet done to a knife...
 
I got some lock tight in my my multytool blade pivot stopped using (lock tight) that day lol.
 
9blades said:
I got some lock tight in my my multytool blade pivot stopped using (lock tight) that day lol.
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Pour water fresh from the kettle over it (so boiling), in my apprenticeship we used to loc-tite eachothers tools together or nuts and bolts to the table lol...the heat wont hurt the temper at all, too low to change the structure.
 
Hope all's well with your knife Blaine. Love the Gerald Ford reference! :D
 
bwperdue said:
It took about 10 minutes, but I fished it out with a screwdriver and putty knife.
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Gloves, man. Gloves.

... When I was wee, I was excited to join the Brownies, envisioning learning Wilderness and Survival Skills (before there was the internets, or subforums. Or computers). I'm not sure what exactly I was expecting, only that it would involve trees, knives, and fire in some capacity.

Imagine my dismay when the first gathering consisted of meeting in the basement of my elementary school, with Kelli West's decidedly non-outdoorsy mother as the Leader.

For whatever reason, one of her main lessons of that introductory session was, "Don't stick peppercorns up your nose."

I was so offended by the pretense of "scouting" ("Next week, we'll make candles!") I thought that maybe the whole thing was a ruse; peppercorns probably weren't even that bad, it was just that this soft woman couldn't manage them without making a Deal out of it.

So as soon as I got home, I put peppercorns up my nose. That showed her.

The point being, several decades removed, I'm now a little more circumspect (if no less prone to picking the more interesting/less obvious fights in a given situation, when offended), and-- your subject title notwithstanding-- I shall not drop a peanut into a can of stain to evaluate the consequences for myself.

Even though I would wear gloves and fish mine out in far less than 10 minutes. ;)

Glad your knife is okay, after all. Whew.

~ P.
 
See, I didn't have any rubber gloves, and the leather and cloth garden and work gloves in the garage wouldn't really keep my hands dry. I also have one of those springy mechanical fingers thingies, but since I use it to fish cat and kid toys out from behind furniture in the house, I didn't want to mess it up, either.

I'll just take your advice on the peppercorns, though.
 
Soap & water won't work as well as placing it in a cup/tin of paint thinner, kerosene or gasoline. Soak it, stir it up in the cup a bit, hit it with a brush, work the blade mechanism, repeat as necessary.
 
Had a friend drop a yellow slimline trapper in a bucket of driveway sealer once. Never could get it cleaned up.
 
I was looking at it in better light today, and it did indeed get a little darker. Not much, but just enough to get rid of a kind of mauve color the pile side had to it. :thumbup:
 
bwperdue said:
See, I didn't have any rubber gloves....
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Well, that's better than forgetting that you had them until after you'd gone Fishing.

I'll just take your advice on the peppercorns, though.
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Oh, no-- you should try it. It makes for a more memorable lesson that way.

bwperdue said:
I was looking at it in better light today, and it did indeed get a little darker. Not much, but just enough to get rid of a kind of mauve color the pile side had to it. :thumbup:
Click to expand...

There's a good outcome, anyway! I'm glad.

FarmKid said:
Had a friend drop a yellow slimline trapper in a bucket of driveway sealer once. Never could get it cleaned up.
Click to expand...

Ugh, I'll bet! Probably would have made more sense to seal it into the driveway at that point, than to try to get it working again. Hard not to at least try, though.

~ P.
 
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