FLEAS NAVIDAD
This Christmas Day of 2011, I want to give the whole world a gift. After years of struggling and after a fruitless search on the Internet, I have discovered how to clean Velcro.
It must have seemed like a perfect solution to have hook-and-loop fasteners instead of laces on children’s shoes, and on sleeves that needed to be closed at the wrist, and many other such uses. But the hook Velcro attaches readily to many other things than its companion fastener. The patches of Velcro soon become festooned with difflewuzz, all kinds of thready and fluffy stuff that probably should have gone down a vacuum cleaner but didn’t. In the case of small children’s shoes, this can be dangerous: you don’t want them to lose their footing or go back for their shoe in the midst of crossing a street.
Picking the stuff out didn’t work. Scrubbing it off didn’t work. Scraping failed. I was having fantasies of seeing if the plastics used to make Velcro could survive muriatic acid.
Then I thought of the flea comb. A remainder from when we used to have cats, it had very fine, very closely set teeth. Maybe they would comb through Velcro, too.
It didn’t work exactly as I imagined, but it worked better than I had hoped. Using one of the teeth will dig out the trenches between the rows of hooks, valley after valley. Technically, what was needed was something made of very good steel, so good that a very thin wire of it would be very stiff without being brittle. The flea comb, held with the teeth between the user’s fingers and employing the end tooth, meets the technical specifications beautifully. When that tooth goes, there’s a long line of substitutes.
So there’s your gift, from one of Vermont’s togglers (a toggler is an amateur inventor who solves problems as they come along rather than trying to patent devices). Fleas navidad.å
Comments