March 8, 20188 yr 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.
March 8, 20188 yr 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.
March 8, 20188 yr 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.
March 8, 20188 yr The amount of work that would go into cleaning everything off the steel tape probably would more than offset the savings in material cost.
March 8, 20188 yr 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.
March 14, 20188 yr Well now i REALLY want to quench and break test a tape measure. I mean, who needs the first 4 inches of one anyways?
March 14, 20188 yr 57 minutes ago, Will W. said: Well now i REALLY want to quench and break test a tape measure. I mean, who needs the first 4 inches of one anyways? No, no: cut the last four inches off, so you can use the rest of it.
March 14, 20188 yr Author 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.
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.