Putting the fluence on it

Putting the fluence on it

I remember magnetic soap holders from when I was a child. I can’t remember what a child was when I first saw one, but they always fascinated me. I love them. There’s an neatness about them, about the idea of not having soap that’s soft and messy, and keeping the area round the taps clear. The fact that it uses some primary school science makes a magnetic soap holder even more wonderful.

There’s only one problem, and that is the way that it’s really easy to throw away that special little metal washer (how’s that for nominative determinism) with the ridge on the underside to dig into the soap. I was probably in my teens when I saw the repair shop and fix for this – using the metal cap from a beer bottle to replace the washer.

Now if you’ve ever tried this, you’ll realise that it’s not quite as simple as it seems. You need a flat bottle top, and if it’s going to go far into the soap you need a hole in the middle to let the air out. You also need the serrations round the edge to be more or less at right angles to the top surface, rather than flaring out. This means that you need to remove the cap from the bottle very carefully so that it’s not folded in the middle, and so that the serrations are not flared out too much.

That’s quite a big ask. It means that you have to remember what you're going to do with the cap, and opened a beer bottle slowly. This, as Robert the robot used to say, does not compute. (Remember Fireball XL-5?)



But if you do that, and then use pliers to flatten the top of the cap, and gently pull the serrated flange inwards a bit, then drill a small hole through the middle of the cap, you have a perfectly usable replacement magnetic soap holder washer. It only took me 15 years to go from the idea to the execution: and that’s where the link to photography comes in…



There are little things that go wrong or get lost, and somehow you never get round to replacing them. Or there are the accessories that you never buy: like the Olympus lens hood for the 60mm macro lens. I found I had a very old and fragile plastic lens hood that fitted the filter thread. As soon as I fitted it, the plastic fractured, and for once I did a repair quickly and it’s still on there, wrapped in black and electrical tape. It’s a combination I use a lot to shoot pictures for this blog.

So, it’s over to you. Please, if you’ve jury-rigged something to fix a photographic problem, write something about it below and include a picture. And if so problem that you’ve known about for a while, and have thought about fixing with a glue gun, black sticky-backed plastic and aluminium foil – now’s the time to go and do it once the presents are under the Christmas tree.