A handle for a tea strainer

Cleaning a teapot the long way around.

Every now and then, you take a good look at something you use everyday and realize that you haven’t really looked at it in a very long time. That happened the other day with our teapot.

I got a good look at it, and realized that the lid and the handle for the strainer were both rusty.

Oops

The lid a was a bit of a suprise since it is supposedly stainless steel.

The strainer handle was less of a surprise. I made it out of coat hanger wire way back when we first bought the teapot and discovered how inconvenient it was to remove the strainer with the hot tea leaves after making tea.

I checked Amazon and found that I could get 1.5mm diameter stainless steel rods pretty cheap. I figured that would make a much nicer handle than the coat hanger wire.

Bending the handle

I bent two stainless steel rods to shape using the old handle for a pattern. I seem to remember it took a long time to make the original one out of coat hanger wire - there’s a world of difference between figuring out how it needs to be shaped and just making a copy. Bending the wires took maybe half an hour this time around.

Since the rods are only 30cm long, it takes two of them to make one handle. Coat hangers have an advantage there - they are much longer.

I clamped the wires together and fine tuned them so that the ends and the loops matched up.

Clamping

The ends need to match up nicely. I didn’t get them perfect, but close enough.

Most folks would weld the rods together. I tend to use silver solder for such things.

Silver solder

All you do is heat the joint red hot then let the solder melt on the steel and flow to fill the joint.

After the handle cooled, I used a hacksaw to cut the soldered end square then scraped and brushed the flux off. The flux is really tough stuff that stands up to a steel brush. You have to poke and scrape it then use the steel brush on it.

Polishing

I used a diamond wheel (it was already on the bench grinder) to smooth the ends of the wires, then used the (nearly worn out) cloth buffing wheel to make it all nice and shiny.

A quick scrub with a scouring pad got rid of the last traces of the polishing compound on the handle and removed the rust from the teapot lid.

All clean that’s supposed to be clean

I am not allowed to scrub the inside of the teapot or the filter. They are supposed to retain a coating of tea at all times - or so my wife says.

All told, it took me an hour to clean up the teapot. This is why I don’t spend much time in the kitchen.

All that remains is to see if the stainless steel handle for the strainer will resist rust better than the old coat hanger wire handle.