bindian
Super Member
Thanks!
Merry Christmas hugs, Brandi
Thanks for the link. For me, I decided that I did not want a hydraulic cylinder type of opener. Once I learned about the screw type openers, I felt that was a much better design for the long term. Only time will tell if I made the right choice.
Interesting that you used black ink outside. I'm not sure it will hold up. Sun exposure tends to bleach color out of dyes, so it will depend on what it is made of. If it is full carbon black, then it should hold up fine, but if it is made from ink dyes then it will probably bleach out. It takes inorganic pigments to hold up outdoors (which carbon black would be). That is why you use paint pens for making outdoor signs and not sharpies as the sharpies fade in the sun very fast. Titanium dioxide is the most common inorganic pigment (TiO2) as it is white, so gets blended with a lot of things, especially in paints. A lot of metal oxides are used for these - Cobalt, Nickel, Iron, etc and the heavy metals in the old days Lead (thus the name "lead paint") and mercury, etc. but those are pretty well banned due to toxicity. The heavy metal pigments were super stable which is why they were used for so long, but as people became more aware of the toxicity concerns, that changed.
I wasn't aware of all that. I was very pleased with how the black ink worked on my cement kitchen counter tops, so that's all I was hoping for. Hopefully I got lucky and bought something that will last. If not, I'll just do it again with something better. So far, it still looks fantastic without any sign of fading, but I'm sure that Summer will be the big test on fading.
Today is day ten of having Covid and the first day that I'm really starting to feel that it's coming to an end. It's never gotten really bad, just a lot of fatigue and random symptoms that come and go. sometimes they last all day, other days it's on and off again a during the day.