ScrapHappy October 2018

One part of this box is fine – but this bit, well..

A long time ago, the world was young(ish) and Maplin still existed for all those essentials such as 741 operational amplifier chips and boxes of nails and screws. Over the years, I availed myself of both these retail opportunities, the latter lasting more years than I care to remember or indeed dwell on.

Over those years, as we all do, the box itself became battered and held together with sticky tape until one particularly rubbish day when not only was pretty much everything going wrong, but the tape gave out, covering the bottom of my makeshift box of tools and camera bits (I was attempting to install a nest box camera at Denmark Farm at the time) with the aforementioned nails and screws. They stayed at the bottom of that box for well over a year.

Last month, I decided to do what all good therapists eventually recommend and “get over it”. I collected all the loose bits and put them in a different, more intact, box. Then I came over all ScrapHappy and decided to try to repurpose this box as a, well, a box but this time for holding my Raspberry pi bits.

All I needed were new hinges and a way of building up the missing bits of lid onto which said hinges would be attached. the answer was obvious – some Sugru* which was a birthday present, and the old heating element from a defunct soldering iron. Obviously.

Any old iron? Well, a bit of one.

If it wasn’t broken before…

The iron heater is a metal tube in which there sits a now broken ceramic element. A quick hacksaw later and the tube could be removed and cut in half. Eh voilà! Two hinges.

Sugru was added to hold the metal in place and to replace the missing plastic.

ScrapHappied hinges

In theory, these bits of Sugru would hold the hinges in place. In practice, not so much.

And it was done! I waited a week for the Sugru to completely set and then tested it.

And it fell apart. The Sugru did not attach firmly to the plastic.

So now it is a box that I have used to hold a couple of ScrapHappy hinges and some (now) useless pieces of Sugru.

Back to the drawing board!!

Well, that didn’t work. At least the box is still, you know, a box.

These ScrapHappy posts are curated by Kate, who provides links to other (mostly sewing) ScrapHappy bloggers at Tall Tales from Chiconia on the fifteenth of every month. I have sneaked another non-fabric-based Scraphappy in when no one was looking!

oOo

* Sugru is mouldable glue. Honest.