06 February 2009

The Joys of a Skip

Just down the hill from my office at work there resides, on a monthly basis, a huge walk-in skip that usually fills up with an assorted collection of bent or broken office chairs, old filing cabinets and pretty much anything else that's going into a landfill somewhere. Most people I know just walk past, after all, it's only rubbish, but you know what...
...I can't resist a skip!
Every time I go past I always have a quick peek over the edge just so as I can see what tempting and tasty morsels have been discarded. For example, the other day some beds from the soldiers accommodation blocks had been dumped. What intrigued me was that the slats were not flat, but laminated into a gentle curve (gotta be project in there somewhere) but on this occasion I declined...I know that in about six month's a light'll go on somewhere and I'll bitterly regret not having a forage.
However, about four months ago someone had lobbed into it several sheets of 1/4" Perspex...I saw it in there just couldn't be bothered to get in there and hoof it out. Big mistake! One of the things that I want to do in the 'shop is to make a new rack for my bench chisels and I need to cover the front of it with the acrylic (so that the blades can be seen but the edges can't be touched) I knew instinctively when I'd left them in the skip that a gargantuan error of the most basic sort had been committed, so I made a mental note that anything similar that I saw in the future would get surreptitiously lifted at the first opportunity.
Such a wondrous event happened yesterday, there was a big sheet of 1/8" plastic sheet in there that some kind soul had casually chucked over the edge that would be ideal for this little chisel project...
... so that was removed fairly smartly and is now in the 'shop. It's not perfect 'cos it's a bit bendy and not really Perspex but for what I want it for it'll be just the ticket.

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