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I Forge Iron

Crazy thought for the day, tape measure-mascus?


eseemann

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Good Morning All, 

I have been looking at people doing Harbor Freight challenges like how many free LED lights that look like light switches they can get in a month and one guy posted a photo with a box full of "free with any purchase" items including tape measures. I figure that HF tape measures would be the cheapest steel you can get and still be spring steel but they would still be some kind of spring steel. I wondered if anyone has sanded or sand blasted a HF tape measure tape and added it to a pattern weld just for the heck of it. I know you would need a bunch of them since the tape is very thin but I thought I would see if anyone has done this in the past. 

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Harbor Freight limits one free gift per customer per day, with a purchase. You need to include your mileage and time so that free gift can get expensive if that is all you are after.

I put my free LED light switch in the glove box of the wife's car, just in case.

 

 

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May want to watch (pun intended) for old clock springs. 

If you have a source for valve springs from engines, they could be uncoiled, flattened, and used. Rewind springs in pull start engines (think lawn mowers) might work.

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Free is not always the best way to go for materials....

We have plastic baskets at work that the delivery guys put the loaves of bread on. I recently found out that the internal braces are railroad approved strapping (AAR 33) - higher carbon strapping. They get hard enough that they snap when you try to bend. If you have a place that gets deliveries by rail they may have piles of strapping for free. We had a company back home that recycled the strapping due to it being the high tensile type, and they literally got tons of it on items shipped to them.

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A guy I met at an SCA event knew a guy that serviced street sweepers and got his hands on a bunch of steel bristles. He used them for a demo of full hard vs full soft. The full hard snapped like glass and the full soft acted like normal wire.   

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