Electricity is expensive in Hawaii and we almost always have a decent trade wind blowing, so you’ll see clothes lines under an eve or across the carport in every home. Before we moved to Hawaii, we already had a couple soctopuss from Ikea for hanging out smaller items. That means they are older, and age and the sun (even indirect) has weakened some of the clips. Todays project was replacing the clips to make the whole thing useful again.
Poor Blue Socto had 6 broken clips. I spent a couple minutes thinking on the easiest way to replace the clips, and came up with using the springs that were already there, with a little modification. The spring wire was really stiff and hard to bend, I didn’t want to bend them too much in case the flexing cause the wire to snap off.
I used heavy wire clippers to cut off one arm of the spring and with a little wiggling removed the other half of the plastic clip.
I bent the remaining spring arm up to hold the replacement clip on. By putting the wire around spring of the clip (where I won’t grab) I shouldn’t be as much at risk for poking myself with the old cut wire. We’ll see. If the cut ends prove to be an issue, I’ll add a ball of nail polish on the cut ends to round over the sharp bits.
The repaired clips. I didn’t overthink this one and it was a quick fix. If only all improv repairs were so simple!