The trouble with trying to be a top blacksmith AND a great lover is the hands! Great rough hands with dirt under the nails. Palms indistuinguishable from a plank of wood. Oh sure, this comes in handy for striking kitchen matches to fire up the forge, and it IS kinda nice to not NEED work gloves, but it gets old fast!

Most mechanics (the old word for blacksmith!) use some form of hand cleaner. Look what's in it...pumice, sand, grit, harsh detergents like TSP. Yep, that'll help your love life! Even when they use good materials like citrus oils, they use an environmentally suspect goop which you just KNOW isn't good for you.

When a friend of mine went to work at a soap works (in Markham, Ontario), I sounded off about the problems I had always faced with that most prosaic of all products....the hand cleaner I used every day. He told me they could make what I wanted, but of course, there would be a minimum order. I told him that was fine....that my health and the cracked skin on my hands was worth the investment in a more natural hand cleaner....it's not like the stuff goes bad on you! We mixed up what I regard as the ultimate perfect cleaner. The components which went into the mix are actually not all that pricey....the cost is in the shipping and the marketing, so even the most premium mixture I could get is still surprisingly inexpensive! So I had them make a cleaner which combined all the best, safest, and most effective ingredients all the other companies have, but more of them.

What we came up with uses Lemon Oil and Orange Oil as the active ingredient. We stuck with pumice for a good fine "nail polishing" grit which is still reasonably gentle and doesn't gum up the septic system here on the farm. Instead of sand (which I can get off the casting bench if I NEED it! Why pay for SAND?) Instead we put in several bags of ground walnut shells! The walnut shells are a bio-degradable grit which feels a bit like a good masonry sand. They dig into the pores of the skin and the swirls on the fingerprints to break up the dirt and grease. Then we put the whole mess into an aloe vera hand lotion base.

No more chapped hands, no more residue on the sandwiches. Brenda uses it to remove her makeup, and I use it to get the dirt and grease off. If I WANT to strike matches in my palm, any residue can be washed off (like any hand lotion) with an ordinary bar of Ivory soap.

I packaged this hand cleaner in half litre bottles and stuck a real funky label on it. (The label is re-produced on this page. We have a French label in the works by the way.) If you order in bulk, there are considerable savings due to the fact that I will put it into gallon jugs instead of those fancy small bottles.

Retail cost:..................................
half litre bottle........................$6.50
Ontario Sales Tax if applicable........... .52
GST (if Canadian resident)................ .46
shipping..................................2.00
(shipping per bottle for large orders......1.00)


4 litre jug.............................$39.95
Ontario Sales Tax if applicable......... 3.20
GST (if Canadian resident).............. 2.80
shipping per 4 litre jug................ 6.00

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