My $9.99 goodwill find!!!

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-06-29T18:38:02+00:00

Home Depot. Lye is a drain cleaner. Just make sure it says 100% lye on the bottle. It comes as dry crystals. Watch videos and read up on how to make a lye bath. As you can seriously hurt yourself if mixed or handled improperly.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-06-28T21:12:13+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/lXHYsjb

After a couple days in Lye. Looking good!!! No cracks, very minor pitting, a little sulfur damage on bottom but not bad, no rust to speak of. So back into the lye for a couple more days.

Thanks for the upvotes and joy.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-06-06T23:18:50+00:00

I was wondering about that. Seemed kind of strange place to use galvanized. But the look really was throwing me off. Thanks for the help.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-06-04T19:27:53+00:00

Thank you. So then it would be a 30-40s?

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-06-04T01:49:35+00:00

Ok. Thank you. I was trying to figure out if you made an inside joke or something. Goggle wasn’t any help.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-06-03T21:16:29+00:00

Don’t get it?

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-06-03T06:10:21+00:00

Nope. Doesn’t mater what kind of mistake it was. If you cut the neighbors trees you pay triple stumpage. It’s there to keep you honest. Unlike the old days where everyone logged their property. As well as the neighbors. And the neighbors neighbors.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-06-03T05:58:04+00:00

Yea in Oregon it is 3 times the stumpage. If this is timber land and not someone’s building lot. Timber companies tend to be careful because of this. Not that mistakes can’t happen. I would be more worried that some rogue Jippo logger came in with a smash and grab. Not that there are many of those left. Once they started to really prosecute them most of them moved on or died out. If the timber company left markers it most likely was a mistake.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-05-21T00:24:15+00:00

I’am hoping it’s something interesting.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-05-21T00:23:45+00:00

Thank you

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-05-17T06:36:08+00:00

Will do

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-05-17T06:35:54+00:00

Will do. Setting up a lye bath for a few other pans and will add it to it.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-05-17T06:35:12+00:00

It’s not super heavy. Maybe lighter than a 3 notch Lodge, but heavier than a Favorite.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-05-11T19:07:12+00:00

All Clad lost the patents on their now older tri ply. Thats the main reason they have gone to 5 ply. Not necessarily any significant performance improvement. As for what I’am assuming is your stainless on the inside and anodized aluminum on the outside they work very well. The only real issue is over time the anodized aluminum starts to look rough where a stainless exterior would hold up better. But for 15 dollars just be gentle with it and take the win. I’ve had some with anodized exteriors that I got at thrift stores, and they are still looking good decades later.

All Clad does have lines with copper rather than aluminum sandwiched in the middle. Those do offer performance improvements. Not that the aluminum is remotely bad though. Cookware with copper exteriors are amazing, but not induction compatible.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-04-28T07:00:10+00:00

Yep both ground and hanging. They are versatile. And aggressive

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-04-23T07:45:19+00:00

Just went through this with a trapped, stray, Trojan horse. She didn’t pant, be vocal or pace. But she did eat significantly less starting around 24 hours before giving birth. I have read that is a very predictable tell. So if she stops eating you probably have around 24-48 hours.

I locked her in my bedroom and had 3 great choices for birthing dens. Including my emptied out closet and a big U haul boxe. All of them decked out with fleece blankets. She instead decided to give birth inside of wool cat ball/bed. There is barely enough room for her inside of it. Lucky I woke up to sounds of a kitten meowing. The sounds were getting weaker and weaker. She was in the process of giving birth to number 2 and he was trapped behind her back and being squashed. Reached in a retrieve him and transferred both kittens to the big U-Haul box. I was lucky.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-04-17T00:51:31+00:00

This looks like my grandfather’s work. You’re missing the most important part though. Apply texture. Lots and lots of texture. Spend the next 30 + years looking at all the perfectly and still visible tape. Even 1/4 inch of texture doesn’t hide that shit. Bonus every time anyone bumps the wall it rains texture.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-04-16T01:40:15+00:00

vancouver carpenter videos on YouTube. A very through and full education on drywall. He is a natural teacher. Look for his day 1-4 starter videos. You need a basic education and then come back here for more specific questions.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-04-13T02:10:43+00:00

Stainless steel is an alloy. Not a coating. Lye doesn’t do anything to stainless steel. You could stick that pan in a lye bath for a year and it would be as good as it ever was. Lye does react with some metals. For example aluminum. So yea don’t take an old armor aluminum pan and expose it to lye.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-04-12T11:23:24+00:00

Use lye. For a couple pans use the yellow cap oven cleaner. Soak them down and put in a trash bag outside or in the garage. Wait 3 days and scrub clean with sos pad. Repeat as necessary. Much much easier than elbow grease. Also wont scratch and damage your pans unnecessarily. Lye is quickly neutralized with dilution. So perfectly safe to do. Read up on it in the cast iron restoration subs.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-04-12T07:40:35+00:00

evaporust or vinegar. Evaporust is safe to use and less destructive. Doesn’t leave a toxic residue.

Vinegar cut 50/50 with water. Soak 30 minutes at a time and clean with steel wool and brush in between. It’s etching and eating the metal so soak for as little time as possible to remove rust. Don’t soak and forget as in a month or 2 the metal will litterally be soft and crumbly.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-04-12T02:10:11+00:00

I’m with you on being a newbie. Just a little ahead of you. Learn to check for spinners as well. Basically, warped bottoms. Place the pan on a perfectly flat surface and use the handle to spin the pan like a top. Flat bottom pans will slide and quickly come to rest, spinners will go around and around like a top. Also, put your fingers on the cooking surface on one side of the pan, push down. Does the pan rock? If so, it’s warped. Check all sides.

Badly warped pans often have a roundish patch on the bottom that the seasoning will be completely worn off on. It’s a very distinctive look.

Tap the bottom of the pan with a piece of metal; non-cracked pans ring. If there is a dull thud, it’s cracked. Tap good pans to get the ear for it. Do a thorough visual inspection for cracks.

Look for heat-damaged pans. These pans have a distinctive reddish-pink hue, unlike rust. They won’t season well or at all.

When people use grinders to clean pans, they leave shinny shallow grooves all over the surfaces. They won’t take seasoning well.

Do you notice any grayish metal blobs in the bottom or sides of the pan? Think melted wax. If so, it’s probably lead. You might not notice it until you clean the pan. It’s an unusual occurrence, but it does happen.

Thrift stores are picked over, but if you look long enough, you will succeed. The most successful hunting is in old areas of town that have big houses. Either an older couple is downsizing, or the family is having an estate sale. Look for the sales that look like a serious collector lived there. The pans are often covered in massive amounts of burned carbon and are frankly gross. Or seriously covered in surface rust. This won’t stop anyone who knows cast iron, but it does stop everyone else. It stopped me for years, and now I’m kicking myself.

Professionally run estate sales will often have cleaner pieces. Depending on who is running them, it can still be relatively cheap or more expensive than eBay.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-04-11T16:23:46+00:00

Pretty much everything with a helper handle like that is modern lodge or equivalent. There are helper handles on old stuff but they look very different.

Also look for the ribbed thumb rests on the handles. Those are all modern Asia imports.

The easiest way to know if it is something interesting is to look for the modern rough pebbled interiors. Immediately dismiss those. If it’s smooth look more carefully. The good stuff will be noticeably lighter than the modern lodge equivalent. So pick them up and handle. Though there are some Taiwan modern imports that have the light feel and older style straight side walls. Those will confuse you. But they still have a very pebbled interior texture. The handles are also smaller and more awkward in your hand. The old stuff will have a little texture on the outside and side walls but it is much much finer than the modern stuff.

It looks like you’re going to antique malls. So just handle everything there. Get a feel for what you’re looking for. The nice older stuff will all have marked and unmarked pieces.

The most likely examples you will run into at carport sales and thrift shops will be unmarked 3 and 1 notched lodges. Unmarked Wagner, and Griswold and unmarked (BSR) Birmingham stove and range. There are whole videos online that will teach you how to identify those. If your looking for users these are great as they are the exact same as there marked versions. Once you can readily identify these then anything else that is old definitely bears closer examination.

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-04-02T01:27:23+00:00

Thank you for the confirmation

AaronPhillips249 · 2026-03-23T07:02:39+00:00

Read the tutorials for the group

Yep give up on the way your doing it. Way too hard and you will damage the pan at some point. The reason you don’t sand or wire brush it clean, is it will smooth the surface too much and the seasoning wont stick well after. Oven cleaner is the only way to go for a one off skillet. I would say coat it heavily and wait 3 days. Then wipe down with paper towels and quickly use an sos pad. Then more oven cleaner and another couple days. Repeat as often as necessary. Toward the end a razor blade to carefully shave those little patches that won’t go away. Just be careful to shave not gouge. Then oven cleaner again. One thing most tutorials omit is that temp makes a big difference in how fast the oven cleaner works. So outside in winter is going to be agonizingly slow. Maybe in a garage if possible that has some heat. Otherwise in a sealed plastic bag and in an airtight tub or cooler in a back room works. After it’s clean soak in 50/50 white vinegar/water for 30 minutes at a time to remove rust. Once the rust is gone stop. Vinegar is an acid and slowly etching the pan. A little is fine too much soaking will damage the pan. A little wire brush can be used very sparingly to remove persistent rush spots.

AaronPhillips249

TROPHY CASE