Plasti Dip

Easily applied plastic coating

Plasti Dip rocks. Available in spray or dip form, I use it on anything and everything from tool handles to 2.4ghz wardriving antenna. It’s available in most home improvement stores (Lowes, Home Depot). I prefer the dip for small things like keys and tools and the spray for things that are bigger.

(This is a Cool Tools Favorite from 2003 — editors)

Door Ease Lube Stick

Unsticks sticky doors, windows, and drawers

Door Ease is a stick of wax for unsticking drawers. I inherited an old stick of it when I moved into a house. The previous owners left it behind. One day I had a sticky drawer and I thought, “Wait, I have the technology!” so I went downstairs and got my Door Ease and it hasn’t stuck since.

(This review was excerpted from our Cool Tools Show podcast interview with Gareth. Listen to it here. — editors)

What’s in my insect photography bag? — Mark W. Moffett

What’s in my … ? issue #118

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I am a tropical biologist and explorer known for my studies of animal social life, and especially the behavior of ants, and I’m acclaimed as well as an insect photographer. Because I often work in remote places, I need to cram any and all tools I might need into a bag that I keep on my back day after day.

Pictured are the small items that I carry to watch ants and other insects —tools I describe below starting at the left and proceeding clockwise:

1. A small mirror to follow ants moving under objects within the leaf litter — surprising how often this helps. I have tracked ants many yards over periods of hours with this mirror, an insane job.

2. A vial of sugar water dyed red to keep track of which ants are which (the ones that turn cherry red belong to my colony, hooray!).

3. One of the vials of 70-80% ethyl alcohol I carry for preserving insect specimens.

4. A vial of dilute honey and a vial cooking oil, used as baits to assess what tasty diet my ants prefer and then to follow the ant workers back to their nest.

5. 20X loupe (magnifier) on a silver chain that I wear around my neck when I need it often.

6. Face mask made from blue cords and the sleeve of an old yellow t-shirt that I should perhaps replace with a mask against Covid — this I put on to avoid disturbing insects (breathing on certain kinds of ants can make them very angry!).

7. Strong twine that can be employed, for example, to tie back any vines that get in the way of my access to a study subject so that I don’t need to cut down any annoying plants.

8. Orange flagging tape to mark the location of an ant nest or some other study subject.

9. Sometimes I see something big! This is a small monoscope with a carabiner to attach it to one flank of the camera bag, which I use to quickly identify a distant subject like a bird before I pull out the 100-400 mm lens from my bag should I decide to study it further, or to take its picture.

10. A featherweight forceps, which allows me to pick up an insect without hurting it (though I’m fearless about using my fingers — ouch!).

11. A black-stoppered aspirator, used to suck bugs into a small plastic container to examine later.

12. A Swiss army knife with all the fixin’s (though I’ve grown cautious about bringing one on trips because before arriving at the airport I often forget to move it over from my camera bag into a check-in bag, and so airport security officials have looked at me crossly and confiscated several).

13. A cheap compass because the one in a phone or GPS can fail in dense forests ( #$%!!! Where am I???).

14. Extension arms that I adjust to position one or two camera flashes exactly where I want them to give my small subjects the best beauty treatment. (Notice the red tape I’ve put around one arm, which makes this device harder to miss should I put it down in the leaf litter — I stick a bit of this bright colored tape to every small item of camera gear I own, such as my lens caps.) This is the only piece of actual camera gear from my bag that I show here. But, FYI: For insect photography I carry a 60 mm Canon macro lens, a 1-5X Canon macro lens, three 25 mm extension tubes and a Canon macro twin light (ring lights flatten the subject and should be avoided unless you’re photographing postage stamps).

Generic Legos/Instant bag hanger/Zipper bags

Recomendo Shorts #8

Recomendos:
Classic Building Bricks
Clipa2
Clear Travel Pouches

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Johnny Apple Peeler

Cores, slices, and peels apples

The first time I discovered the device known as an Apple Peeler-Corer-Slicer, I was delighted. At the time, I was making a lot of apple pies, and peeling and slicing the apples was the part I liked the least. With this amazing device, you can peel, core, and slice enough apples for a pie in a minute or two.

Once I started drying apples and pears, I appreciated it even more, because there was even more fruit to prepare.

There are a number of competing brands; they all work pretty much the same way: The fruit is impaled on a spike, which is turned by a handscrew to drive it through a coring blade and past a skinning blade, while a slicing blade cuts it into a long spiral. (A single slice down the vertical axis of the coiled fruit spring cuts it into a neat set of rounds.) The main difference is whether they have a suction cup to attach to your countertop (works only on very smooth counters), or a clamp (requires that you have a suitable lip on your counter.)

It works best with regular-shaped apples and pears, and requires them to be on the hard side. If they are too soft, the spike on which you turn them will spin inside the fruit rather than spinning the fruit. But you want less ripe fruit for pies and drying in any case, so it just means you have to get your harvest in early! In the video below, you can see what happens when your fruit is too ripe.

Pumps-A-Lot Water Pump

Simple emergency sump pump

[This is a Cool Tools Favorite from 2003 – MF]

This is a cool tool. It is a powerful water pump you can use without electrical power; instead it uses the Bernoulli effect from the water pressure in a hose. This pump saved us a few weeks ago. It rained all day and then at about 5:15 the power went out. Our sump pump in the basement had been going every two or three minutes but there were still two or three inches of water covering the cellar floor when I got home from work. I was desperate to keep the level from getting up to the furnace. Our neighbor Jan had a generator to run their sump pump, so she could offer me her PUMPS-A-LOT which they’d used to use before they got the generator.

You connect the pump to a faucet with a garden hose. Inside the unit, there’s a nozzle pointed at the output hose. It sucks water from below, spitting out that water together with the propelling water via the output hose. In truth, I didn’t believe it would work. The makers claim you can pump 800 gallons per hour or 6 gallons for every one gallon of water you use. But if it didn’t work, I’d be filling my cellar with more water. So I tested it in a bucket of water first. It worked! Like magic. It emptied the cellar in a few minutes! Since it has no moving parts, takes up little space, it is an ideal emergency tool.

What’s in my insect photography bag? — Mark W. Moffett