- [Voiceover] There's three kinds of detectives.
City cops, big agencies, and then there's me.
Dylan Hart.
Life Hack Detective.
As a professional sleuth,
I've found my fair share of swindlers
and put 'em under glass.
But sometimes the biggest cases walk
right in your front door
with sultry lips, fair skin, and a leather clutch.
She caught me right in the eye and said,
"I have what you're looking for."
And with that dropped a golden goose
right in my lap.
I took a peek and I'll tell ya,
I've never seen anything like it.
A strange metal cylinder
with an infinite spectrum of possibilities.
It was time to unlock its mystery.
(jazz music)
Our investigation into WD-40 resulted in
thousands of possible uses.
We narrowed it down to about 10,
starting with a little evidence removal.
Have you ever found yourself in a situation
where you feel compelled to draw
on your hardwood floor with a marker?
Well, it's your lucky day.
WD-40 possesses some innate ability
to get rid of the marker after you spray
it on there and let it soak for just a few minutes.
So go ahead and give it a nice spritz
and then grab a paper towel
and do some light scrubbing.
After about 30 seconds,
all the evidence from your marker party is gone.
Waterproof shoes.
Apply a nice, full coat to your shoes
and let 'em dry out.
Once it's fully set in,
the water's going to bounce off your shoes
more than my bad checks.
Just make sure that you understand
the trade-off you're making.
Your shoes will have an oily scent.
While it's not perfect,
it's providing a good amount of water resistance.
All right, I don't know what happened
to these bathroom tiles.
Go ahead and saturate the entire area with WD-40.
Now I'm gonna let it sit for about five minutes.
After some serious scrubbing,
I was able to get the tiles spotless
and I even got some of this extra gunk off
that was stuck in there.
So if you can't find your bathroom cleaner
and you've got WD-40 on hand,
I guess you know what to do.
So let's try one that involves me being gloveless.
A stuck ring.
I put a ring on that was a couple sizes too small.
Barely went on and it was seriously difficult to move.
I even had a friend help me pull it off.
This really was on there good
and it wasn't coming off without some sort of assistance.
So I went ahead and sprayed WD-40
all around the ring and on my finger.
After spinning the ring around a few times
and going back and forth,
it slid right off.
Look, accidents happen.
Especially when you first wake up in the morning
and you aren't quite firing on all cylinders.
Okay, so you managed to leave some plastic
on the toaster and it melted in there
and got all gunky.
Look, I can tell you, worse things have happened.
I assure you.
The good thing is this is gonna allow me
to demonstrate WD-40's goop removal capabilities.
First, unplug the toaster, okay?
Now go ahead and saturate the area with the spray,
but try not to get too much in there
because it is going to burn off anything
that you leave in there.
Let it sit on the hardened goopy mess
for a little while.
It'll work it's way through.
Now this one was a bit tough,
but with some scrubbing and some pushing,
it eventually all popped right off.
The toaster was plastic-free and ready to boogey.
Now you can do a lot more than just
clean things with this stuff.
For example,
look at my old pair of kitchen shears.
There's only a few things that a little lube can't fix.
Spray around the blades and the connection
holding them together.
Work it in there good.
Get a paper towel or just keep spraying it.
Once you're confident that you've covered
all the problem areas,
then set them out to dry and they're going to be
as good as new in about five to 10 minutes.
Now watch these things go.
Straight through a piece of paper.
Straight through a can.
And straight through my little sister's crayons.
Now you can apply this method to old tools, as well,
and probably have some great success.
If you use adhesive to hang photo frames
or mount things on the wall,
you've probably realized at some point
that it's extremely difficult to get off of there
without damage.
So bust out your 40,
spray just a little bit into the crevice,
and slowly work your way through,
peeling and spraying and maybe even scrapping
until the adhesive has been neutralized.
One thing that often goes neglected are drawers.
Silverware, linens.
My favorite is my single stapler drawer.
And you know what?
Lately it's been sticking.
I'm gonna go ahead and remove the drawer
and squirt some WD-40 right into the tracks.
Once I felt like the coat was sufficient,
went ahead and put the drawer back in
and then moved it back and forth
to make sure that the WD-40 got dispersed.
This is gonna get your coveted drawers
right back on track, moving smoothly as ever.
Now I am not looking forward to this one,
but since everything so far has been successful,
the real mystery is what won't it clean?
So I figured I'd throw some caked-on
kitchen gunk at it.
So let's see if WD-40 can get rid of the problem.
I started by saturating the build up
and I let it sit for a few minutes.
Now I used an awful lot of spray for this one
because I really want to make sure that it's covered.
Of course the natural progression is to
grab a regular sponge and start workin' at the gunk.
I attacked this thing solidly for about three minutes.
Eventually it got to a point where the items
on there just seemed so baked in that
they weren't going anywhere.
I grabbed a metal cleaning pad
and lo and behold,
everything came right off.
Well, at least most of it.
You might be wondering
does this work on carpet stains?
Well, I'll test it out on my own carpet to find out.
Let's see.
What would be hard to remove?
All right, let's go with the ketchup.
And I'm gonna really work it in there good
and even let it sit and dry for an hour.
Go ahead and squirt all over the stain
and let it saturate for awhile.
And now just like other stain removal products,
get a towel and scrub furiously for 30 seconds
to a minute.
Did it work?
Let the results speak for themselves.
The sponsors we have on Household Hacker
help us keep the content flowing
and keeping it high quality.
So I want to give a big thank you to Casper this week.
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Keep in mind you spend a third of your life in a bed,
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Now Casper has given us a promo code
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You just go to Casper.com/household
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Thank you all for watching and sticking around.
We'll see you next week.
(techno music)