wooden tongs, magnetic tongs, salad servers

OK, let us get started.

What follows is the outcome of coatings. They will go mat,
tommorrow, if the weather holds. Rain was predicted for today
and tommorrow. It did not rain today, so tommorrow will

be just fine?



What follows is just showing you that convex surfaces
were formed today on all of the artefatcs I had created
earlier.



In fact, there are more of these, more refined by my
belt sander, but that will be not very interesting!

I have formed a few concave surfaces and in what follows,
at the bottom right, you may see characteristic coarse scurs,
running down the surface.



Scurs are pararell to the stem and are easy to remove with my
flapper, which will leave gentler scurs, parpendicular to the
stem direction.

OK, today's main topic has to be this. Take a look at the following pic.



You may wonder what these are. They are my boots holders,
portable, because I have much larger holders for home use.

These are meant to be taken to your friend's house or
to drinking places, so that you can hold your boots
neatly, without looking like withered plants!

However, for the purpose of my argument?, they are
tongs! Can you not see that they are tongs,
to all intents and purposes? Then, what am I leading you up to?

Well, I am leading you on to salad servers.

I have made my salad servers, yes, after a fashion、and given them away.
Lots and lots of them, but, they were simple spoons and folks,
separate entities!

From my own experience, tongs are much easier to use and you must
know that there are colourful tongs on the market, plastics and
metals. What I have in mind are cube shugars and salads.

However, I have not seen properly functioning wooden tongs.
I did buy one of those at a 100 yen shop, but, that was
terrible, not opening properly, not closing properly.

This is because of the fact that with wood of any kind
there is not an inherent property easily associated with
opening and closing mechanisms.

Now, take a look at my chopsticks container with
ferrite magnets.



I was wondering if I might have to use, instead, rare earth
magnets for my purpose, in order to keep the folk (hand?) and the
spoon apart, of my eventual tongs.

Rare earth magnets are expensive, so I tried the following.



This is very much illuminating. One end of my magnetic
holder is lightly bound by a rubber band. You see that the other end
is slightly ajar, just because of the 0.15 kgf magnetic repulsion.

Needless to say that the rubber banded end is also repulsive, but,
that repulsive force is over-ridden by the rubber band. Eventually,
pivoting mechanism will replace this forced contact.

I think I can use cheaper magnets for my tongs. The only remaining
factor is the design of the pivoting mechanism.

On the other hand, more straight forward wood only design
based on my boots holder is also attractive. With boots holders
I use coniffers for the holding pieces, but, if I work with

broad leaves, I might get even better responses, and of course, I need to
think about the shape of the spacer, but it may be worth the effort!