Add Chopsticks to Your Toolbox

Have you ever tried to retrieve a small part from deep within a chassis? You might've wished you had a long slender pair of tongs, pliers or tweezers to reach down and grab it with. You do. That tool is a pair of chopsticks.

It helps if you know how to use chopsticks, but don't worry if don't. It's easy to fashion them into a pair of "tweezer-sticks" as shown in Figure 1, below. All you need is an elastic band (aka rubberband) and a make-shift fulcrum, such as the wrapper the chopsticks came in (rolled up into a compact wad).

I've used this tool to...

• get a pebble from out of a garbage disposal
• pick spent blossoms, a Maple tree seed or a hungry beetle from potted plants when the growth is too dense to get my fingers through
• remove part of a Pop-Tart from a toaster (Figure 2)

I have, in fact, used a pair of twigs for a crude application of this idea, such as when I picked up a dead mouse that was in a flower bed.

But if you need to remove a wedding ring from the glowing coals of a charcoal grill, be sure to soak them in water beforehand.