PROJECT: The Vorpal Blade Went Snicker-Snack

In my ongoing quest to make myself into the Hot Middle Age Bisexual I aspire to be, I signed up for a tool sharpening class at my local queer skill-sharing community center, MakeWith!

While I did have my own gardening tools that needed sharpening, I set them aside in favor of the supremely rusted sheers belonging to one Dylan Meconis, because look at these guys. If I'm gunna learn a new skill, I'm gunna apply it where it'll make the most impact. Being a former Theater Kid, you know I have a taste for the dramatic U_U

Step One was sandpapering off rust. Wait, no, Step One was taking the tool apart! Then you attack each blade separately, which gives you full access to its entire length without the other leg(?) getting in the way. What do you call the two halves of scissors? Legs? Arms? Lesbians? Oh! They're bows! Wow. I never would have guessed that.

Now, you're supposed to scrub the parts down against varying degrees of sandpaper and/or sharpening stones until all tarnishments are gone, leaving only gleaming, mirror-reflective metal.

I only had two hours, so I opted to just get these blades usable, if not aesthetically pleasing. (Like me!) So I scraped away enough rust to get them smooth again, even though I didn't grind off enough material to remove all the discoloration.

You start with a really coarse sandpaper/sharpening stone and then progressively move to finer ones. The rougher surface (100, 200, or 300 grit) gouges off the most bulk on your tool, leaving lots of visible scratches. The next round uses a finer abrasive count (1,000, 4,000, or 8,000 grit) to buff the previous scratches down into very fine scratches, making the metal look like frosted glass. Then, the grande finale! The finest abrasive possible is used (60,000 grit) to leave a mirror finish on your metal that would hardly look out of place in an evil queen's lair who demands of its reflection, "Gardening Sheers, Gardening Sheers, on the wall, who is the fairest of us all..."

Obviously, these sheers did not make it to the second and third stages of discoloration removal/mirror-shininess. BUT! These fuckers can CUT!

They do!

I took 'em for a test drive and they laid waste to multiple clusters of overgrown dandelions and Queen Anne's Lace around my yard and they sliced right through 'em like they were butter. Snicker-snack, motherfucker!

Completely unrelated to this, I have recently run out of rubber bands. I keep them in a little jar in the kitchen, along with another jar for the little bits twine that wind up accumulating in my house. They exist in a constant ebb and flow of having bits added to them and removed, as I find them and/or need them. But, somehow, I've withdrawn more rubber bands than I've acquired recently and my bike lamp is a bit janky so it needs a rubber band assist to stay in place on my handlebars, which means I've been biking around with a light that occasionally launches itself into the road at high speed and it has the dings and scratches to prove it.

When I biked up to Dylan's house to drop off her clippers, I asked if she had any extra rubber bands; which is how I wound up trading my gardening-sheers-sharpening labor for her nascent rubber band ball.

This is community in action, people.