Not sanding, but smoothing

[Skipweasel]

For all I know this is a well known trick and I've just reinvented it...

I've been painting a lot of MDF lately, using waterbased primer (not the "proper MDF primer as it doesn't seem any better and costs more) and find that it's a bit pipply after just one coat.

To smooth down the tiny roughnesses I was sanding it but then I ripped the last bit of paper late in the evening and was too late to buy some more.

So I used a kitchen scourer - not the green viscious sort, but the white "non-stick" flavour. Works a treat, flattens the surface, almost burnishing it, but leaves enough key for the next coat to adhere to. Better, it produces no noticeable dust.

[Mary Fisher]

It is and you have :-)

Mary

[fred]

In article , Skipweasel writes

Yup, commonly known as the mk2 wheel but well done all the same :-)

Available commercially in various grades:

've all done it, when I was but a stripling youth I invented a totally new form of metered fuel injection using hot wire airflow measurement, only later finding that Bosch has already patented it as L-Jetronic (IIRC).

[jal]

It wasn't, but he may have. Thanks Skipweasel.

[Mary Fisher]

Yes, I designed a layout for our very small caravan and thought I'd invented the wheel.

Then I saw the smallest Eriba :-(

Still, it's good to know that someone else thinks the idea is so good that it's used commercially :-)

Mary

[Skipweasel]

Ain't that annoying. I got to the Dyson cyclone vacuum cleaner when I was about ten. Bum.

[newshound]

In the days of graph paper I once had a pile of experimental data to analyse and I tried (and failed utterly) to write a programme on a PDP-8 to manipulate and re-scale the various arrays and plot them out on an analogue plotter. When I first saw Lotus 1-2-3 I realised I should have tried harder......

[fred]

It does work the other way sometimes, there was a small scale British windsurfer maker that was approached by the lawyers of some big American outfit. Apparently in the seventies they had patented the concept of the universal joint at the base of the mast that is fundamental to how the whole thing works and they claim royalties off all the other manufacturers. They were pushing for a cut from mister small brit but he politely said no, they sued and he demonstrated prior art (notebooks, sketches and models) indicating that _he_ had invented it in the fifties when he was a snapper. It didn't blow their patent completely but I think he made a bit out of licensing and broke their monopoly :-)