The best things in life are truly free (and usually filthy)

Firstly, apology.  Albeit a totally half-assed one.

If you look back through some (way) older posts, you'll see some bad photo links in past blerhgs.

I used Photobucket (for free) quite a bit, especially on our local forums, some stuff on MTBR, and obviously here.  I understand charging money for things and services.  Bandwidth ain't free.  America!

But going from free to $399.00 a year for third party hosting?

I don't think that many people are reading a bunch of old posts that often, and besides, I make about zero dollars off this blerhg, if not negative dollars.  Thusly, I'm not throwing down $400 or going back and downloading those lost images and reloading them VIA Google photos or elsewhere.  I really wonder how many people are gonna go from free to $400 annually?

Lost to the ether, mine images.

Speaking of lost, one of the benefits of getting around by bike would be finding other people's lost shit AKA ground scores.  Sometimes, they are pretty pointless, like the torque sledgehammer I found years ago.

I rode for miles with this in one hand... just because.   It's truly pointless without the operating manual.

I scoop some stuff because I think that I might need it some day.  A sanding block.  A putty knife.  A key chain with a tiny, lockable, two-sided carabiner.

I pass on sockets most of the time, occasionally picking up an extension if it hasn't been run over too many times.  The other day, I turned around and went back for yet another stupid open/box end wrench.

Usually, it's an Imperial size wrench that I see lying in the gutter.  I've got more of them than I can shake a torque sledgehammer at (all I've ever found that it's good for).  Alas, it turned out to be a 13mm.  No idea what I'd do with it, but I took it home and tossed it on the satellite office table in the living room.

Ignoring it for days, it dawned on me that it looked really close in size to the nut on my homemade fender for the tarck bike (made from a real fender, a zip tie, a carriage bolt and copious amounts of Shoe Goo).

It worked... sorta.  The fit was close enough that I wondered if one of the many wrenches I had found over the years would fit.

Of course one of them did, 13mm being bigger than a 1/2" by .3mm... and I have a plethora of 1/2" wrenches.  Most popular size to fall off the back of a contractor's vehicle twenty years running.

So no longer does my medium-sized crescent wrench sit in the satellite office upstairs.  It's back on the pegboard where no self-respecting bike mechanic would allow it to exist.

Last weekend, I saw a set of channel locks on the way home from drinking/bike riding with Nick.  I passed them up.  They were really greasy, perhaps ran over a few times.

Dammit.

I turned around and scooped them up.  I've already got a bunch of ground score channel locks of various sizes at home, but whatever.

I got home, and on closer inspection, I saw it was a Knipex Cobra.  I've never played with one, but with some googling and fiddling, I figured it out.  Within a few days, I found its perfect use.

Industry Nine has tightened the fit on their Torch end caps from the OG design.  It's to the point where sometimes I struggle to remove them.  I've found myself avoiding some easy free hub maintenance just because I don't feel like struggling with them, inventing a tool to get them off, or scratching the shit out of them with various tools that don't really grab the thing well enough.

This thing (with a little rubber grippy fabric to keep the ano from getting scratched)?

Buenos.

It really is the little things in life that make my world a better place.  Mebbe not as cool as when I found a hundred dollar bill (which woulda bought me three months of third party hosting), but I have no idea where that went, so mebbe these found tools are slightly better.