Free Stuff

Why use Free Stuff?

• Why travel out when you can make it in 5 or 10 minutes for free.
• Finances are very tight for some people
• Sometimes there's just no need to go & buy
• Sometimes I can make better than I can buy

Sources

• Skips
• Freecycle & similar schemes
• Leftovers

Tools

Tools from scrap wood

Many tools can be made from scrap wood, such as:

Mallet

• A piece of 2x4
• A lump of wood on the end of a stick of PAR.
• Round the handle corners off

Silicone Tool

Silicone Sealant smoother & profiler is made from feathered polypropylene

Lathe

A wood screw with its head cut off makes a basic lathe for small parts.

• Screw into the item to be turned, put it in a drill chuck, and tool gently.
• Very coarse sandpaper can be used if no suitable tool is to hand

Dust Catcher

An envelope stuck to the wall catches drilling dust

Water Level

• Pipe filled with water: water settles to same level at both ends
• Any pipe can be used as a water level, eg hosepipe.
• Clear pipes make this easiest, but it can be done with opaque pipes too.

Plumb bob

Anyone can work out to hang a weight on a string, but this only works correctly if the weight hangs symmetrically.

A4 Ruler

A4 is 210 x 297mm. This is 8.4"x 12".

• Fold the paper in half and quarter in each direction.
• Down the side the folds are at 3", 6", 9"
• Across the top the folds are at 2", 4", 6" (or to be more precise, 2.1", 4.2", 6.3").
• Halfway pen marks can be added by eye to give a mark every approx 1".
• If you snip off (or fold over) a half inch before folding, the horizontal inches will be fairly accurate too.

Hand Ruler

Know your hand span. You now have a built in ruler.

Wood Ruler

Mark a piece of scrap wood in units of choice. Any item of known size can be used to get distance markings in the right place.

Kitchen Knife Saw

Big frozen meat cutting knives will saw wood. I've used one to trim chipboard. They don't make great saws, but do work.

Wood Drill

for wood & and other soft materials

• Use a nail, hammer in and remove.
• Use a screw or cuphook, screw in and remove
• A very small screwdriver bit makes a barely usable drill bit. Requires a fair bit of force to work, but may be less work than going somewhere when you forgot the right bit.

Masonry Drill

• A cold chisel makes a lousy large masonry drill, but it does work. Rotate it a bit between each hammer blow, and test your patience.

• A screwdriver will drill aerated concrete blocks & soft bricks.
• Even cutlery can be used on breeze blocks.

Holesaw

• For aerated concrete & soft brick:

1. Take steel tube, such as scaffold pole.
2. Cut rough teeth on the end - shape and accuracy don't matter much.
3. Hammer once, rotate a bit, repeat till done.

Countersink

Knife. Make 4 cuts to remove the material.

Floor brush

• Just grab a fistful of plant material.
• Almost anything with stalks will work as a temporary brush.

9v Battery Tester

• Tongue. Apply battery to tongue.
• Tongue is senitive to different voltages over the 6v-10v range
• Tongue FSD is under 12v, never test batteries of above 9v
• Never test wallwarts or other supplies, tongues are rated for disconnected 9v batteries only.

Ladder

• People do make ladders from new wood or leftovers
• Theyre very cheap & quick to make
• Multisection ladders & multifunction ladder sets can be made this way at a tenth the price of a BS approved ladder.

But...

• A simple design or construction oversight can cause very serious injury, so I wouldn't be happy to recommend making one.

Materials

Half inch chipboard

Offcuts are common in skips. Not normally worth chasing, but if things are that tight its the one material you will regularly see in skips down south. Not really true up north.

Nails

• Just use screws, hammer them in.
• Works best with chipboard.
• Screws are no freer than nails, but if you need nails and have screws lying about you don't need to buy anything

Wallplugs

• Matches - versatile, easy to use, strong grip
• Twig, & insert a match down the middle - lousy plugs
• Scraps of any slightly flexible plastic or wood
• For bigger holes, fill hole with sawdust & pva and screw in once set

Firewood

• Plentiful in skips
• Offcuts from DIY sheds

Mortar

Many free additives can be used in mortar to reduce material cost. See Mortar Mixes

There are also some alternatives to cement mortar, such as:

• Papercrete
• Cast earth
• Stabilised earth
• Cob
• Adobe

Tyre Inner Tubes

can be used as:

• chair webbing
• lightweight hinges
• springs

Expanded polystyrene

• Insulation
• Stuffing beanbags

Curtains

• Most types of cloth can make curtains.
• Natural fabrics can be bleached if ugly, and dyed with the few very low cost dyes available.
• Used clothes yield cloth patches for applique, especially velvet, satin etc

Chalk

• A small strip of plasterboard makes chalk for marking.
• Crushed plasterboard can often be substituted for chalk dust, though rarely worth it.

Wallpaper Paste

• Boiled flour & water
• Adding alum makes it storable.
• Not for cold damp locations where it may moulder

Fillers

Lots of things can be used as effective fillers.

• Lime & chalk
• Lime & sand
• Lime & mud
• Paper, flour, water & alum, boiled
• Toilet paper & glue
• Sawdust & (preferably diluted) glue
• Ground rice & water
  • dryish mix for a coarse bulk fill
  • wetter mix for a fine finish
• Rice pudding
  • Rinse off the liquid, shake all water off, mash, add some dry filler.
• Glue & earth
• Sand can be incorporated into any filler to improve dimensional stability, but it makes it unsmoothable, so ok for bulk fill but not smooth surface filling.
• Glue & shredded paper

Insulation

• Sheet Cardboard. Large sheets are available from most shops handling large quantities of goods
• 1" - 2" card boxes, eg biscuit or dry catfood boxes
• Filling boxes with dry leaves increases insulation value
• Airbags from packaged goods can insulate around hot water tanks
• Cardboard faced with foil is used behind radiators on external walls to reduce losses
• Flammable insulation such as cardboard should be fireproofed.
• See Insulation for more information.

Pigments

• For dying cement mortar
• Coarse gritty pigments are only good for rough finish paints, eg outdoor masonry paint on render
• Emulsion paint
• Subsoil - a range of colours from broken white to brown
• Brick dust (red) - pink, red, brown

Glass cleaner

• Diluted vinegar.

Cistern Diaphragm

• Vitalite margarine tub lid, or similar.
• These lids are thicker than the usual small marge tubs.

Roofing Felt

For a small temporary patch only. Take some synthetic fibre cloth and apply a thick coat of gloss paint. Wait until dry enough to handle, and paint the other side.

Putty

• For glazing or filling wood.
• Mix just a little household gloss paint with chalk powder.
• Quick if you only want a little bit.

Descaler

• Tomato ketchup
• Vinegar
• Tomato juice

Paint Thinners

• Turps substitute
• white spirit
• boiled linseed oil - greatly prolongs drying times
• NOT petrol, its explosive and the fumes too toxic

Wood Preservatives Thinners

• diesel
• paraffin
• heating oil
• lamp oil
• boiled linseed oil
• NOT petrol, its explosive and the fumes too toxic
• Some of these thinners are not compatible with some preservative types, try a little first.

Putty Thinners

• A few drops of water also works with linseed putty, despite the fact that it is not a linseed oil thinner.
• The paint & preservative thinners can also be used as linseed putty thinnners for putty too stiff to use.

Self Adhesive Sand

• Mix dry sand with a little clear spirit based varnish
• For gaps between paving
• For small patching only
• Varnish hardens, preventing insects & plants digging through the sand

See Also

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