There aught to be a law...

[Tom M King]

I've used Bronze screws more than a few times. I can't remember when I bought any brass screws that I liked, and boat builder suppliers still sell Bronze screws with slotted heads. They aren't an exact match for brass hardware, but not bad after some years of patina anyway.

George, I really appreciate your how-to on de-plating steel screws, and will get some use out of it. I had some old plain steel wood screws out of my Grandfather's store, but not all the sizes that I run into.

[steven c newman]

These little screws were very tiny. Hard to hold onto. Normal practice is the use the same candle I apply on the soles of my planes. Just a cheap parrafin candle. The scribe from the combo square, tapped it into the wood a bit, and a few wiggles to loosen it up. It also made a coone like hole.

Lumber costs was around $8
Hardware was about $12

Just a simple pine box to house three planes. I can set the box in the Tool Chest #2. There is a box for the bits I made earlier, and I can stack both the three plane box , and the Stanley 45 box, all in one corner of the chest.

[Stew Denton]

Hi All,

A comment on soap for lubing screws. There is not enough lye left in modern hand soap to be very corrosive at all, only traces are left. If much lye left in the soap, it would attack your skin and be very dangerous for your eyes. Thus, the bar soap manufacturers work very hard to make sure they wash all of the lye out of the soap, except for trace amounts which are not very hazardous.

I do prefer wax, but have used soap when I didn't have wax very handy. Modern bar soaps are mostly slightly caustic but only very mildly so. Caustics aren't generally considered very corrosive anyway, it's the acids that are corrosive.

Where you generally think about soaps being a problem is where they help keep the metal wet. The water isn't really corrosive either, but the water dissolves oxygen from the air, which is then in intimate contact with the steel, and it is the oxygen from the air in intimate contact with the steel that actually corrodes the steel. It isn't really the water or the soap.

All that said, if a person is still concerned about soap and corrosion, but still likes the way soap works, then he can use pH balanced soap, like Dove, as was mentioned above.

Stew

[Patrick Chase]

A comment on soap for lubing screws. There is not enough lye left in modern hand soap to be very corrosive at all, only traces are left. If much lye left in the soap, it would attack your skin and be very dangerous for your eyes. Thus, the bar soap manufacturers work very hard to make sure they wash all of the lye out of the soap, except for trace amounts which are not very hazardous.

There is one big exception: The hand-made, vegan (not!), fair-trade, sustainably-produced, all-natural etc etc soaps that some people insist on using.

I agree that any name-brand bar soap is going to be fine. Classic Ivory was about as caustic as those come at a Ph of 9 or so, and even that should be OK.

EDIT: Changed to reflect Ivory's reformulation

[george wilson]

I use beeswax because it sticks better in the screws' threads. Paraffin is o.k.,and I have used it many,many times,but it is so "slippery" about staying in the threads that I now just use a stump of a beeswax candle. I've never used soap. Just always preferred wax.

[Stew Denton]

Hi George,

Agreed, when I worked on the crab apple limbs a friend gave me, to seal the ends so that the wood would dry usably without splitting, I melted and mixed bees wax half and half, roughly, with canning wax, for the reason you list, the bees wax is sticky, is somewhat flexible and less brittle in cold weather, and the paraffin does not have either of those desirable characteristics. The reason for mixing it with the less desirable paraffin canning wax, was to extend the bees wax a bit.

In cold weather the paraffin is especially a problem, as it is so brittle you can hardly get it to soften enough to stick in the threads of the screw. I now have a good supply of bees wax, and it is much to be preferred, in my view, to the paraffin wax or to soap.

Stew