Housekeeping

 

Not mine; just for reference.
FTR, mine was worse than this.

Somewhere in my travels, I acquired yet another GI canteen cup to put together as part of an entire Go bag of useful items.

Except this one was rusted as shit. Inside and out.

I bought it at the time, because it was the only GI-style one they had (which was what I wanted), and I knew it was salvageable. Plus the rust knocked a few bucks off the asking price.

I have no idea how some stupid sonofabitch managed to rust up a stainless canteen cup, but the orange patina inside and out was unmistakable. I suspect the miscreant private somehow fornicated it up, and was too lazy to fix it, and too frightened of the obligatory platoon sergeant ass-chewing he had coming, so he palmed it off into the surplus world, until it came to me.

Much like the story of eight Marine privates locked in a room with a sandpile and eight crowbars*, this piece of kit proved that nothing the military issues is idiot-proof, because idiots are so ingenious. (Or maybe his doctor just told him to get more iron in his diet. IDK)

It has sat on my shelf in plain sight for some months, daring me to remedy its condition, until today.

I too am lazy, but only in the "I ain't got time for this noise" version of "I'm not going to sit here for five hours with steel wool, Ajax, and CLP scrubbing like hell until this thing is serviceable."

We are older, and now have tools to do the sweating for us.

We pulled out the Dremel 4000, having also recently acquired an assortment of flat and cup brushes (brass, carbon steel, and stainless) to undertake the task.

After selecting the brass cup brush, and tightening it into place (and wearing eye pro, naturally; if you'd seen how many tiny brass bristles were strewn about afterwards, none too friendly to corneas, you'd understand why) we began the effort.

Ten careful minutes later, after staring at it untouched for several months, we have now a shiny newly rust-free stainless steel canteen cup again.

(Work tip: the cup got hot wherever we were working. The shaft of the cup brush hotter still, and we gave it a little breather halfway through.)

We'll keep an eye on some of the darker spots, lest they return to their former state, but we can now put the cup into the stove, put the canteen in the cup, and slip the steel cooking cover behind it, and fasten the whole to the incomplete Go bag, now including water, a means to boil it, and a way to cook almost anything, anywhere, with sticks of wood or a fuel bar.

The sins of Private Smuckatelli have now been expiated, and the Go bag is the better for it.

*[Revisited an hour later, the privates were intact, but two crowbars were broken in half, two were bent double, two were inseparably fused together, and two were completely missing, even after sifting the sandpile. True story.]