I was moving house, and with my car activities over the years, I had accumulated a lot of metal, and it was a good time to clean up. I arranged a date & time one afternoon after work, for the local scrap metal merchant to come around with his truck and meet me at the old house. I waited for him for over 2 hours. He eventually called & told me to leave it all out the front and he’d get it the next day (while I was at work).

So I moved all of it out to the front yard. Took me well into the night. Hundreds of old car panels, several engines, axles, transmissions etc. It ended up being 7 tonnes all up. I also had 10 buckets (pails) that were 20L/5 US gallons in size. All full of nuts, bolts, washers & assorted fasteners from cars and DIY project work. They were heavy duty buckets that my work regularly bought (hundreds per week) from Dow Corning, full of silicone. Once the contents were used, and the remnants left to cure, it peels out easily, and you end up with a fantastic, perfectly clean bucket. I’d had dozens over the years, and used them for all sorts of things. The best part was that the lid had a rubber seal in it, and when you snapped it back on, the bucket was watertight.

Anyway, the next morning the scrap guy called, and was very annoyed. “How the f*** am I supposed to pick up all those nuts & bolts?” I replied with a chuckle “There’s a handle on each bucket.” His reply “there ain’t no f***ing buckets, just piles on the grass.” He ended up leaving with everything but the nuts & bolts. That afternoon I went back & found someone had tipped out every bucket on the grass, and taken the buckets. I was really, really peeved. I had nothing else on me to put all of this in - the house was now empty, so too the sheds and garages. I had less than a week before I had tenants moving in, and even if I picked up what I could, I still had a front lawn full of projectiles waiting for a lawnmower to fire them in every direction.

So I decided to walk down to my old friend’s place about 5 houses down & see if he had some boxes I could use, or at worst case, some plastic bags I could put small loads into. I was also thinking about speaker or hard-drive magnets to make it easier. Most of it was ferrous metal, and I figured I could look for the stainless & brass by hand. As I passed the house 2-doors down (who had always been pigs the whole time I lived there) I noticed all of my (now empty) buckets) stacked into each other, and the lids all stacked in a pile, sitting beside his boat parked on the driveway.

I was going to take them back, but a better idea came into my head. I decided I would get more buckets from work the next day, but so those “stolen” buckets would be useless for him, I borrowed my other neighbour’s cordless drill, and drilled several small holes around the base, right near the raised rim that keeps the bottom off the floor. They weren’t easy to spot.

I also drilled the buckets that I took around for the cleanup - but I put 1/4″ holes in them, all across the base, and many up the sides, and across the lids. They never disappeared….. And the stainless bolts I had to fish out of the grass by hand….. They went across his lawn too. Wasn’t going to make it easy for him to pick them up with a magnet.

I don’t know if my handiwork ever got any results. I hoped he would try to use a bucket to hold water for live fish, or to put valuable stuff in to keep watertight, and have a nasty surprise later, but never found out if anything happened.