How are you disposing of your oily finishing rags?

[Charles Lent]

Mine always go outside and into a 5 gallon metal can with a lid that contains about a gallon of water. They are left there until I'm taking out the trash. I then wring them out and put them into the trash.

About 50 years ago I was using linseed oil on a large table, and when I was spending time re-arranging some things in the shop so I could set up some additional saw horses to allow more space for the table leaves to dry, the rag that I was using to wipe on the linseed oil laid crumpled up on the corner of my workbench. It must have sat there for about an hour before I got back to it. When I picked it up to use it again, the rag was almost hot enough to burn me. It taught me a strong lesson about oil soaked rags and ever since then I've taken them out of the shop just as soon as I stop using them. I won't even spread them out to dry inside my shop and definitely never near anything that will burn. When helping a cousin a few years later, he had no place to put the rags when we finished, and I insisted that he had to take them outside. We ended up draping them over a chain link fence between his neighbor's yard and his. After they had dried, he put them in his trash. A few days later the neighbor asked why his fence had been decorated, and my cousin told him the reason.

Charley

 

[nn4jw]

Thanks for all the comments from everyone.

Like several of you up until now I've been tossing my rags into a 5-gal tightly covered trash can. The handle seals the lid on so I haven't been concerned about the lid popping off if something did ignite. In the small quantities of rags I've typically tossed in there they have dried just fine and I've tossed them in the trash with no problems afterwards. But, I haven't really done that with linseed oil, only because I haven't used that very often.

The only "problem" I've had is just usability in that it's kind of a pain to get the can open and closed to toss in rags as I need. I never set an oily rag down anywhere but in the can and always seal it back up each and every time. I've solved that "problem" by buying one of the red 10-gal Justrite cans with the foot operated lid.

Living in the city of Durham means my trash cans are plastic. Hanging wet oily rags on them is not an option for what should be obvious reasons. Neither is tossing one into the trash can where it could ignite. They need to dry first. For those of you who have mentioned putting undried oily rags into the trash on trash day consider that rag could still ignite in as little as an hour, either in your can or in the trash truck. Do you want to be responsible for a burning trash truck? I don't know if soaking the rags in water does anything but delay the process until the water evaporates or not. Just doesn't seem like a safe practice to me.

The missing link for me is safely drying the rags before tossing them into the trash. Safely means controlling what happens if ignition occurs. That and preventing the rags from getting loose in the wind and ending up where they shouldn't.

I'm going to solve that by placing the wet rags into the 5-gal can I'm no longer using in the shop and putting a piece of weighted chicken wire over it as a lid out on the gravel leading to my shop. If they ignite there the can just becomes a mini burn barrel. If not, after they dry they'll go to the trash can for disposal.

Again, thanks for the participation. It's been a good discussion.