Micro-landscapes in cardboard after some pliers-cranking

Cross-threading is a bummer. Through a momentary lapse in punctiliousness, I apparently managed to get a male-threaded pipe plug started into the female-threaded end of a piece of pipe at a tiny angle. Or, given that the plug didn’t seem to be canted at all, perhaps I failed to remove a particularly pernicious bit of grit nestled in the threads. I don’t know. In any case, the plug went in smoothly enough until, some millimeters short of being fully screwed-in, it locked up and would go no further.

I’d been holding the pipe in one hand and using the other to turn a T-handle hex key that was seated into the plug’s inner-hex drive. Trying to lefty loosey the plug didn’t yield any results.

The first escalation was using a pair of KNIPEX TwinGrip slip joint pliers to get a better grip on the smooth external surface of the pipe and then apply more torque via the hex key. At the target spot, I wrapped a small, rectangular piece of thin cardboard around the pipe to reduce cosmetic damage.

The TwinGrips have jaws with ornate tooth patterns and a pair of perpendicular cavities designed to facilitate brute-force removal of stubborn screws and other fasteners and they bit into the pipe well enough, but I couldn’t get either the pipe or plug to turn. Later, with oil drizzled onto the exposed threads of the plug and a hex-drive bit in an adapter fitted onto an extensible-handle ratchet that gave me more leverage, I got them separated. Threads on both parts seemed somewhat the worse for wear, but I didn’t feel up to trying to rehabilitate them, so I dumped both the section of pipe and the plug.

The cardboard went into the trash too, but a bit later on, after I’d taken front and back photos (combined into the image above) and had a peep at it through a cheap 200X microscope that slides snugly over a mobile phone camera. Some of the pics taken under magnification looked interesting and a few of those are included below.

First, here’s a picture of an intact section of the cardboard. Here and there, red and black or blue fibers seem to have been mixed into the brown pulp. A fungal-mycelium-looking web of white fibers also looks to be present, permeating the material. These might be indications that this stuff, categorizable as either thin non-corrugated cardboard or thick and rigid kraft paper, incorporates some recycled material.

It’s interesting to note that the pea-sized plastic lens in my toy 200X microscope is only a smidgen underpowered compared to the optics in the handful of surviving early microscopes constructed and used by the famous draper Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who reportedly began dipping his toes into microscopy because he wanted to examine the fabric, yarn, and ribbon that he was selling to tailors and seamstresses at a higher level of detail. Wikipedia has this to say about his gear:

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek made more than 500 optical lenses. He also created at least 25 single-lens microscopes, of differing types, of which only nine have survived. These microscopes were made of silver or copper frames, holding hand-made lenses. Those that have survived are capable of magnification up to 275 times. It is suspected that Van Leeuwenhoek possessed some microscopes that could magnify up to 500 times.

The remaining the images in this post, shown below. are of areas where the teeth on the TwinGrip’s jaws pierced the cardboard. Some were snapped while I looked at the jaw side and some were taken while I examined the pipe-contacting side. Shiny spots, mostly on the edges of the troughs, are specks of 304 stainless steel from the pipe that were dug out by the pliers and wound up embedded in the cardboard.