Another pickled pepper grabber [OR] Inexpertly deburring the holes and rounding the corners of a stamped-steel teabag-squeezer-squisher

Forks, butter knives, spoons, and tea spoons. Those are the implements that populate the open-top compartments in the plastic cutlery tray in one of the topmost drawers in our kitchen. Unless you’ve inherited or splashed out on a complete set of sterling silver Edwardian-era cutlery that includes highly-specialized implements like horseradish spoons, grape shears, sugar sprinklers, salt spoons, and lobster picks, you’re probably in the same boat. And some steak knives and “chef” knives for actually cutting stuff instead of spreading condiments. You may store the real-knife knives in a block. To conserve precious counter space, we keep ours in another tray.

Over the years, we (and probably you as well) have acquired a plethora of other specialized tools, some of questionable utility, made of plastic or stainless steel. A translucent yellow, slotted egg yolk separator: useful but rarely used. A hammer-shaped cast aluminum (?) meat tenderizer: useful. A green plastic lettuce knife: rarely used.

You can fish olives out of their lanky glass jars with olive spoons or olive forks but imho olive spoons and olive forks don’t really work that much better than regular spoons and table forks, provided they’re small enough to fit inside the jar. The same goes for pickles. But what about jarred sliced/shredded hot peppers or hot pepper rings? They slide off spoons, usually at the moment when you’re removing the spoon from the jar and the pieces of pepper get jostled by the mouth of the jar. Spearing them with fork tines doesn’t really work well either.

So I’ve been looking for tools that might have been designed for other tasks but which can be used to wrangle shredded peppers and pepper slices. Like these small stainless tongs with flat perforated claws sold as tea bag squeezers:

One pair of unmodified teabag tongs and a second pair I've mangled. — One pair of unmodified teabag tongs and a second pair I’ve mangled.

They were stamped out of a 0.8mm-thick sheet of stainless steel and then bent into shape, probably by hand. In photos taken with a handy-dandy clip-on mobile phone “microscope” over the phone camera lens, I can see some scoring along the edges, presumably from deburring at the factory. The three-by-five grids of holes meant to facilitate egress of tea from the teabag may have been at the same time that the blank was punched out of the metal sheet or perhaps it was a separate step. On the outwards-facing sides, the rims of those holes are smooth to the touch. On the inner faces of the grippers, though, the hole rims are rough enough to snag at a paper towel.

Tea bag grabbers, scraps of hand pad, and the file I employed — Tea bag grabbers, scraps of hand pad (the brownish piece is cut from a full-sized is 3M Scotch-Brite 7440 pad and the gray one is a piece from a 7448 pad), and the half-round file I employed.

With a file and some hand pads, I made the inner faces of one pair of grippers smooth to the touch. While I was at it, I rounded the corners and scuffed up the entire surface to give it more of a silvery matte finish. The result looks and feels good enough for yours truly, but on a micro level the gouges I’ve inflicted are reminiscent of glacial striations:

Zoomy photos of regions of the tong grippers, with wax pencil scribbles to make IDing the face easier (see human-eye-scale photo key below).

Before going to town with the clip-on mobile phone “microscope”, I marked the faces I’d be inspecting with wax pencils: white and yellow for the un-altered tea bag squishers and red and orange for the ones I’ve mangled.

With the mobile phone “microscope”, I also had a gander at the surface of the file and the hand pads.

The surface of the flat side of the file, after I'd put it to use but before I'd cleaned off the stainless steel crumbs. — The surface of the flat side of the file, after I’d put it to use but before I’d cleaned off the stainless steel crumbs.

I grabbed the half-round file that was closest to hand, a Pferd 1152 C2. In the Pferd universe, 1-cut files (coarse files) are sold in cardboard sleeves with green squares and the numeral “1” printed on them. A 3-cut (fine) file has a red square and “3” on its sleeve and a 2-cut (medium) file like this one has a sleeve with a yellow square and a “2”.

Another zoomy picture of the file, taken near the tang end showing the start of the The surface of the flat side of the file, after I'd put it to use but before I'd cleaned off the stainless steel crumbs. — The flat face of the file, closer to the shoulder and the tang, showing the start of the “2nd cut”.

A video taken closing in on the file face and withdrawing again:

Zooming towards the face of the stainless-steel-chip-laden file.

Here’s a zoomy photo and a bounce-in-bounce-out video of the piece of 3M Scotch-Brite 7448 hand pad I used. The miniature ring light on the “microscope” is quite bright and the hand pad matrix looks more white than gray in the photos and video I took that day.

Close-up, via mobile phone microscope, of the hairball-like structure of the piece of 3M Scotch-Brite 7448 hand pad.

See the minute grains clinging to the strands of nylon fiber? They’re either silicon carbide abrasive material or tiny pieces of stainless steel removed from the tea bag tongs. Or a mixture of both.

Giving the piece of 7448 hand pad the same video treatment as the file surface.

The mobile phone microscope’s lil’ ring light washed enough of the color out of the blue towel I used as a backdrop that it looks baby blue or powder blue in this picture:

Close-up photo of the blue surgical towel, showing the color-draining effect of the phone microscope's built-in annular LED. — Close-up photo of the blue surgical towel, showing the color-draining effect of the phone microscope’s built-in annular LED.

Since mutilating one of the pairs of tea bag tongs, I’ve used it to extract hot pepper slices from a glass jar and it did indeed get the job done better than a fork, which was what I’d been using, but wasn’t perfectly suited to the task either. And so the search continues.

Some other promising-looking implements are currently in the kitchen, awaiting an opportunity for testing.