LIPSTICK. A use for lipstick for mating surfaces.

[Philip Davies]

I found outside our home a make-up etui, and scattered up the road, the contents. It probably fell out of a car. I daresay the owner would regret the loss, but how would I restore it all to her? Not a neighbour’s, but likely to belong to a mum collecting her child after school. And they have the six week summer holiday now.
I was going to throw it all away, then remembered I was almost out of Dykem Red. I can’t just go to a hardware store to buy this. Then I thought, “Well, before they invented engineers’ blue, they used lampblack mixed with grease, and lipstick is, apparently, a colourful grease. So, to illustrate, I took this old wooden smoothing plane, discovered that it had never been properly fettled, and smeared lipstick on the iron to see where the high spots are in the plane’s mouth, which can then be pared away.