Dissapointment with the advertised flamability of certain products.

Some days are more exciting than others. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail, but I know first hand that many solvents, particularly the industrial variety are extremely flammable. Acetone for example is the liquid form of acetylene gas, commonly used in welding and cutting operations. A standard plastic one gallon mop bucket full of acetone, that then catches fire, in a room filled with 5 gallon and 55 gallon drums of various flammable liquids for example, creates one hell of an exciting day. Especially when you're the guy holding the sole fire extinguisher that stands between a devastating fire (probably with big explosions) that will bankrupt a semi-famous American artist and cause the evacuation of a few city blocks due to the toxic fumes swilling forth. Good times.

So I have a garage. It's big. 3 car job. I think we may have parked a car in it once upon a time, but that hasn't happened in ages. No, preferring to keep myself busy, the garage is converted into a workshop. I shared it with my father before he passed. It was cool. It is cool. It is full of fun and excitement. I'd write about shooting sharpened wooden stakes across the garage with a router, but really, that's sort of mundane and unexciting for my garage. The dog didn't even bother to get up after the ricochet. She just looked at me like "What stupid shit are you doing now?" and went back to sleep.

But this isn't about excitement. Or about fire. I set myself on fire, or my clothes anyway, that I know exciting fire stuff when I see it. This is about disappointment.

In my garage I do lots of things. This weekend, one of those things I needed to do was paint something. A shelf. Not a big deal. I have lots of paint. I even have the paint that I want to use. So I brush a coat on to my shelf. It sucks. Bad brush strokes. Looks terrible. So I sand those down and decide that spraying it is the way to go. I have a spray gun. Not a fancy one, it's pretty cheap. It works though. Except when it is seriously clogged with paint, because I never cleaned it out after the last use, and that was 5 years ago.

Ok fine.

So I soak the spray gun in some paint stripper. Don't know the brand, don't know much about it. I know that the label claims it is the safest paint stripper on the market. It touts that it is much less likely to eat the flesh off of my bones than any other brand. That's kinda cool, because it does devour rubber gloves. The same rubber gloves I was wearing to protect myself from the 'safer' paint stripper.

The spray gun is really in reasonable shape. The paint inside wasn't even totally dry. Parts were moving freely. Valves were opening and closing just like they should. Things were looking good! But then I had to take it one step further just to be sure. I wanted to make sure that the feed tube was clean. It's an aluminum tube, about six inches long, about 1/4" inside diameter, and has a bend halfway up. I figure a wire with a small swab of old rag will be just the ticket. So I whip one up. It looks a lot like the rod that one would use to clean a firearm, only much more 2 minute manufacture with a good splash of redneck ingenuity thrown in.

I pull the swab through the tube. It cleans a good bit of old paint off of the inside. I pull it through again. It does the same. I make a new swab. I put the paint stripper away already but I have my mineral spirits out to thin the paint that I am going to put in the sprayer when I get that far. I douse my little swab in mineral spirits.

Mineral spirits. Keep away from flame. No smoking. Keep away from sparks. Very big fire white man. BIG BOOM! Keep away from your coffee mug because in addition to being pretty toxic, the ambient heat shed out of the little hole in your plastic mug might just be enough to bring about the end of the world because of the fire you're going to start like that with the mineral spirits.

It's very flammable stuff, see?

I pull my swab through the tube. It gets stuck. Crap. I try pulling. No, it's stuck good. I try pushing. No, it's still stuck. I pull and I push and I yank on it with pliers, and I clamp it in my vice and I drag the bench that the vice is mounted on around the garage and the yard and back again. The stupid swab will not come out.

Then my wire breaks. Ok fine. I try pushing with more wire. I bend the wire. I try some heavy stainless steel rod. I bent that too. Then the swab budged. I was hopeful, so I tried the heavy stainless rod again. It bent more and tried to bend my feed tube after trying to get stuck, and a few more laps with the bench and the vice.

I've spent about a half hour cleaning the spray gun now, and about an hour trying to get the swab cleared out of the feed tube.

It's a cotton rag that I made the swab out of. Cotton burns. It's soaked in flammable mineral spirits. Blamable mineral spirits also burn.

A plan emerges, and out comes the propane torch.

The little propane torches that fit on the little propane bottles are not enough for my needs. They're ok if you have a little can of pork and beans to heat up, or some sissy assed pipe to sweat. No. My propane torch is a man's torch. Screws into a 20lb. tank, and will spot heat (albeit slower than I prefer) 12 gage steel to a pretty good red glow.

I point the fire down my feed tube with the intent to incinerate the hell out of that stupid swab. Are you ready for what happens next?

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

It was a good plan. It should have worked. But it didn't. Probably something to do with a lack of oxygen in the tube.

I would have been ok with the whole deal if something stupid had happened. Like shooting a flaming paint soaked swab out of the feed tube and into my eye. I would have understood that, and chalked it up to Murphy's Law, and moved on to paint my shelf with one eye covered by bandages. But nothing happened. I spent another half hour trying desperately to set fire to something that by all claims on the label should have gone up like the Hindenburg.

I eventually went back to poking it with the rod and cleared it out. Then I painted my shelf.