The Mad Recycler, Volume 2, number 5, May 2000 Rubber Road Kill The Inside Frank Therrell said one day, "It’s good to have a piece of rubber around." I remembered that when I saw some car tire inner tubes in the dumpster, and—what can I say?—I took them home. I didn’t have any use for them back then, but a couple of weeks ago I built a conference table for a company in downtown Fairbanks, and I made good use of those inner tubes. I built hollow table legs, because they had to be bolted to a concrete floor and the attachment shouldn’t be seen from the outside. I cut 45-degree angles at the edges of some 1x material and glued the pieces together. For this project I needed an awful lot of clamps and it was really difficult to clamp, because the 45-degree edges tried to slip away. My dilemma was that I only had three clamps with which to build eleven legs. The solution was the inner tubes! I cut them into roughly one-inch strips and wrapped my new rubber bands around my glued table legs. The rubber bands held the pieces all perfectly aligned, applied enough pressure, and didn’t mar the wood. Those bands are exactly the right clamps for difficult jobs like gluing a chair or a picture frame, where normal clamps fall off. Rubber bands are a must for every Alaska household, say I. The Outside Bob LaChaussee, our neighbor from across the road, makes big, sturdy garden planters out of old tires. The trick is that the tire must still be on its rim. The tire’s rim will be inset more deeply on one side than on the other—the shallow side is the side that faces out, away from the car, and this side should be facing up as the tire lays on the ground. Bob marks a pattern on the side wall of the tire with chalk or crayon. As a pattern guide and to help him find the connecting points, he uses an old bicycle wheel and marks out twelve points (or any number divisible into 360). He starts his chalk marks on the outer side of the tire to create a deep planter. Then he uses a jigsaw or sabersaw with a metal blade to cut a wavy or perhaps pointed pattern around the tire wall. He makes sure not to cut too far towards the tread, or else he would end up exposing the steel imbedded in the rubber, and the exposed metal fibers would stratch and prick your hands. After this easy preparation comes the real task. Now he has to turn the tire inside out. He flips the tire over, so that now the inner, deeper side is up. You can either try to stand on the rim and pull the sides up (something Bob does with smaller tires), or you can put a handyman jack on the rim, hook chains to the sides (poke holes right through the rubber), and just jack the tire inside out. With bigger tires you should definitely use the jack method! Once the tire is turned inside out, lay some fabric or a circle of wood in the bottom to hold the soil in the planter, and then it’s ready to fill and plant. Put one or two of them in your driveway—if you accidentally drive into one, they are very forgiving and won’t even make a scratch on your bumper. • • • Hans Mölders collects useful materials, and builds things with them. Frank Therrell collects useful stuff, and builds places to display it or use it in. Bob LaChaussee collects stuff and materials of all sorts, and invents things with them. All three are infamous for their stuff, and for their ingenuity in collecting it.
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