Aaron Williamson's webl

Finally got my hands on a glue gun today and put together the magnetic spice rack that’s been on my todo list for a few weeks.  I got the materials list from here, but it probably originally came from here.  Basically, you hot-glue magnets to the back of watchmaker tins and fill them with spices, and you get a pretty and convenient way to store your spices, like so:

I’m pretty happy with it, but the instructions leave out a few important details.  First, the hot glue doesn’t bond well to the magnets or the tins if they’re cold — like the glue gun manual says, you’ve got to heat metal before you can effectively hot-glue it.  You could do this by leaving them out in the sun or under a hot lamp.  I didn’t have either option today, so I laboriously heated the magnets and tins with my soldering iron.  I also used “super strength” hot glue, which seems to work better than the garden variety.  Also, I’m no physicist, but I’m pretty sure you can’t just glue either side of the magnet to the tin — if you use the wrong side it won’t stick to the fridge nearly so well.

Also, the watchmaker tins are a clever hack, but they’re not that well suited to the purpose.  The lids are made to lift off without much resistance, so I ended up gently bending the sides of the lids in to keep them from popping off unbidden.  For this same reason, you have to be careful when pulling them off the fridge — if you grab them by the lid, Roomba will be sucking more than his share of allspice.  Screw-off lids would work better.  I would also prefer larger tins (you can get them one size larger) — these don’t hold much more than a couple of tablespoonfuls of spice, so you’ll be refilling your chili and curry powder pretty frequently.  But larger tins would be heavier and would probably require stronger magnets, which would (Catch-22) make the tins pretty tough to pull off of the fridge.

I also got fixed my camera lens, which I broke on the day I took this.  The only problem with it was that I broke two little plastic “teeth” off the lens mount (the part that connects to the camera body) when I dropped it on the floor.  It looked like an easy fix, but when I sent it to Canon they quoted me $100 for the repair.  Looking around online I found one place selling the little plastic piece I needed.  Six screws and $20 (shipped) later my lens was like new.  So I guess the moral is, if it seems like you could fix it yourself, you probably can.