Sunday Rerun: Zip It

 Police officers, penitentiary workers, and lovers of bondage everywhere were rankled several weeks back when the insurrection was raging and people were seen running in and out of the Capitol with flex-cuffs. Their rankle-rage stemmed from the fact that some were calling these ersatz handcuffs "zip ties." They are also called "flex cuffs," but they work on the same principle as that zip tie I use to seal my trash bags every Monday night.  There is a flexible tape with "teeth" that grab a little thing called a "pawl." When the tape is pulled tight, the teeth engage the pawl with a ratchet action that cannot be reversed, forming a tight link that our refuse collectors always seem to appreciate.

Just as William Claude Dukenfield is better known as W.C. Fields, zip ties have a real name. Their brand name is Ty-Rap (why hasn't some hip hop artist chosen that as a stage name?) and their origin is one of those stories I love to share, so here 'tis...

A man named Maurus C. Logan worked for Thomas & Betts, an electrical company. He happened to be touring a Boeing aircraft plant one day in 1956 and was watching people assemble wiring for airplanes. As you might imagine, the wiring for an airplane is a tedious, cumbersome undertaking, a lot more complicated than repairing a lamp or an extension cord. There's so much wire, they had to lay it out  - thousands of feet of it - on 50-foot long wooden sheets to be bundled up into thick cords. Back in the day, people wrestled these thick cords and tied them together with waxed nylon rope. Each knot of the rope had to be pulled tight by hand. Logan, in talking to the workers, heard that their hands became so callused by hundreds of tiny cuts that they referred to each other as "hamburger hands." He figured there had to be a way to gang these wires with something than bound them quickly and safely.  

It took two years, but he developed and patented Ty-Rap in 1958, and from the aircraft industry to the weekly task of sealing my trash bags, they are everywhere now. 

And while I was researching all this, I found these some other uses for zip ties on a site called https://www.onegoodthingbyjillee, so why not share them, I thought? 

1. Key Ring

2. Binder Rings

3. Organize Cables - you'll save a lot of hassle if you put a red zip tie on each end of cords and cables running to your pc. One day when you're guessing which plug to pull out of the power block, you'll be glad!

4. Luggage Lock- run one between two zipper pulls. But he sure you have a knife on you to cut it off when you get where you're going! Be funny if the knife were inside the sealed carryon bag.

5. Bubble Wand - a small loop at the end of a long zip can be a bubble wand, sure!

8. Childproofing cabinets - zip two adjacent knobs!

9. Plant Support - a loosely-looped zip around a plant stem, with a pencil for a stake in it, and there you go!

and the most amazing of all: Zip Tie traction aids for shoes! 

Some icy morning when you're headed out to scrape ice off the car, run a zip tie around the toe of your shoe, and pull it tight, with the fastener pointing to the ground, trim the excess, and away you go!