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Monday, March 4, 2013

Reduce Reuse Refresh!

Submitted by Marcel Stieber

We live a daily challenge of having things break on us. Sometimes it's due to misuse or accident, but typically it's because of the poor quality. Sadly it seems that even the expensive imported goods are subject to premature failure which is in part due to the extreme heat and weather, but largely due to the fact that goods exported to Africa are often B-stock that failed to pass all inspections. It's very common for me to find a brand new in box plug or receptacle simply not working due to a skew piece of plastic molding that was never removed in manufacture.

The result of all this is that we have lots of broken things lying about that eventually end up completely retired, or in this case, reused. These photos show a lovely piece-of-junk floor fan that comes on a nice wobbly stand straight from the store and always falls over and breaks when it lands. Fortunately the handiman in me sees this as an opportunity to make a wall mounted fan for the welding bay. A short little while later and we have a lovely custom-designed, hand-built, luxury wall mounted oscillating fan to cool even the sweatiest welder on the hottest of days. It's rewarding to see the 'cool' things you can pull together from the junk pile and give them new life.

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