Cheap and Easy Boat Cleaners You Can Make At Home
Raritan Engineering would like to share with you this week some great information about how to make your own boat cleaners.
Your marine toilet systems experts talk about how if you’ve got a locker full of nearly empty black-streak cleaners, waterline-stain cleaners, mildew preventers, bilge cleaners, and boat soaps, now is your chance to retire them all and reduce your cleaning arsenal to just four or five products that can fit in a small bucket.
This is not our first foray into the topic homemade maintenance supplies. A few years back we dug into the topic of homemade bronze polishes and found a couple of concoctions that proved their mettle—so to speak.
Home brew No. 1: Salt and vinegar paste
Recipe: Dissolve 3 teaspoons of salt into 1 cup of white vinegar. Add enough flour to make a paste, then scoop the paste onto a clean sponge and polish. Rinse with hot water and buff dry with a soft cloth. Result: This polish worked surprisingly well. all and earned a rating of “Good” on our test scale.
Home brew No. 2: lemon paste
Recipe: Polish with a soft cloth soaked in a solution of lemon juice and baking soda, or sprinkle baking soda on a slice of lemon and scrub. (We made a paste as in Brew No. 1.) Result: After the mini-volcanic reaction of mixing lemon juice and baking soda settled down, the resulting paste powered off the stains exceptionally well with minimal scrubbing.
Home brew No. 3, Morris’ Mix:
Recipe: Subscriber Scott A. Morris makes his polish by blending polishing compound (not rubbing compound) with a small amount of silicone car wax—according to Morris, a little experimentation will yield your best mix. Result: “Fair to Good” overall, however, it took a bit of rubbing to clean our nasty bronze.
Benefits of Making Your Own Boat Cleaners
Your marine toilet systems professionals discuss how overall, the results in the home brew category were pretty impressive, particularly considering that the first two have all natural ingredients and that all three are economical to make. While the Brews Nos. 1 and 2 cleaned the bronze, they lacked the “luster” of products such as the Miracle cloth.
Of all the homebrew recipes we’ve tested, the one we’re most pleased with is our One-Penny mildew cleaner/preventer, which tester Drew Frye has tested extensively on his boat. We tried two formulas creatively named Formula A and Formula B, which cost just pennies to make.
Formula A
1 quart hot water
1 tablespoon baking soda (sodium bicarbonate)
2 tablespoons washing soda (sodium carbonate)
2 tablespoons trisodium phosphate (TSP)
Much like Concrobium (which it is modeled after), our homemade Formula A removed the mildew from test carpet on board and kept it away, even though the area got wet again. It was also very effective in the moist-environment lab test.
Formula B
1 quart hot water
2 tablespoons baking soda
2 tablespoons Borax
1 tablespoon TSP
Formula B was the second-place performer overall in our test of mildew sprays. It was certainly the best value. It cleaned well, prevented mildew from returning to the carpet, and greatly slowed mildew infection in the moist-environment test in the lab.
So don’t forget these ways to make your own boat cleaners. 1) Salt and vinegar paste; 2) lemon paste; and 3) blending polishing compound (not rubbing compound) with a small amount of silicone car wax.
How to Fish Midge Patterns With Style
You’ve probably been there. Two hours from home, halfway through the thermos of coffee, knee-deep in cold water on a cold day, and not a single, solitary fish to show for it. They’re taunting you.
The most likely answer? Midges. Nine times out of ten, when you see so many rings that it looks like the result of an invisible hail-storm, the trout are hitting midges.
But one thing is very clear: trout love to eat midges. Your average brown trout in a midge hatch is like a fat kid with a bowl full of M&Ms. Although each of the bugs may not make much of a meal, a river is like a conveyor belt that delivers thousands of the tiny morsels to a fish. Midge hatches are especially prolific in tailwaters, those rivers kept at constant refrigeration by bottom-release dams.
Midges are usually small, but they aren’t necessarily microscopic. A size 18 barbless hook will provide satisfactory results in most situations. An angler carrying a small midge box with a series of tried-and-true patterns from size 18 down to size 22, with a very few smaller, will be equipped to handle 90 percent of the midge fishing situations out there. Generally speaking, big midges will allow you to use more complex patterns, such as the Copper John. For really tiny midges, stick to the simple stuff.
Try cutting the leader where you want the shot to stop sliding, and then knot it back together with a simple double surgeon’s knot. Crimp the shot above the knot and let it slide on down; the knot will keep the shot from hugging your fly.
A better bet, though, would be one of the new breed of vertical emergers based on the Quigley’s Cripple, such as the JLC Midge. Douse these flies with floatant and lube up your tippet for several feet. You won’t have the advantage of the split shot to keep your line taught and your chances of popping your tippet go up considerably, so be gentle.
Midge fishing in the winter time can be an angler’s only chance to avoid going stir-crazy. When your favorite freestone is snowed in, and your dog won’t even budge off the hearth, bundle up tight, load that thermos, and find a sunny piece of slow water down behind a dam in the valley.
Check us out here at http://raritaneng.com/ and see how we provide you the best products in the marine sanitation industry today.
via Steer Clear of the Marine Cleaner Con
via Pro Tips: How to Fish Midge Patterns in Winter – Orvis News