Hard to Find Stuff
Several hard to find things are prominently mentioned in this website. Here are some tips on how to locate them.
Cork Borers (i.e. Leather Punches)
Turns out that these are now priced like valued antiques and
outrageous in cost. I got lucky and salvaged my cork borers as a random collection
of sizes from broken sets swept up during a big renovation cleaning and on their way to
the dumpster. I polished them up and sharpened the few good ones.
It appears an even better solution is to use leather punches. These are steel and available in range of sizes even a few interesting special shapes.. The classic company for purchasing leather working tools and supplies is:
Look on their website under hand tools. Many of the punches are in number sizes and quite small. Also most of the hand punches that look like fancy pliers are all make quite small holes. But there are a number of punches meant to be hit with a hammer which are in very nice sizes like 1/4 to 1/2 inch in diameter. There is even a nice inexpensive special board just right for use to back the punches while punching holes. Tandy Leather Company also has stores in some larger cities which might have some of the right sizes of leather punches in stock.
Geo Balloons
These unique balloons are only made by Qualatex (Pioneer Balloon Company). Qualatex balloons are used by a vast array of flower shops and gift shops and balloon decorators. If you live in a decent size city, there is probably a company that sells balloons to all these places. You are looking for the Geo balloons in 16-inch size, either round or blossom style, and in a bag of 50 balloons in assorted colors. This is the format you are most likely to find them in. There are a few places which might sell them to you over the web as well such as:
Look on their website under latex balloons and special shapes to find the Geo balloons. You can occasionally find Geo's in single color sacks, but typically the only ones available are assorted color 16-inch rounds. Another option might be a friendly balloon decorator company or flower shop that purchases Qualatex balloons commercially and could get one or two bags of the Geo's for you.
O-Rings in Large Sizes
Lots of companies make O-rings and you can by them in lots of about 100,000 at a time.
There seems to be very few places to get a handful. Be sure to try your local
auto parts store. Sizes of interest are 326 and 327 especially but 325 might not
be too small and 329 might not be too big. Other than that, on the web, there
seems to be just one good place, a company famous for ages for supplying small
fiddly bits of hardware:
Look on their website under components and look for O-rings made from Buna-N material. They have packs as small as 10 and 25 and they are quite inexpensive. You will probably pay more for the FedEx shipping than for all the O-rings you could possibly use. There are two sizes one might use for the 2.5 inch housing mentioned before, but such large I.D.'s with such small cross sections are of questionable use, but worth trying.
12/03