After five years of wanting a parts washer--if not longer!--I finally get one, get the thing assembled and put in its own special place in the garage. It sits there now, effervescently red, and devoid of solvent. Why? Why, you ask, would you spend more than 90 minutes cleaning and assembling and rearranging and not use your brand-new, much-anticipated toy? Particularly when you bought the thing specifically to clean engine parts for the Escort engine project which is now in its fifth freaking week? When I've had the wear parts sitting on the dining room table for more than two weeks?
BECAUSE THE DAMN WATER MAIN BROKE AND WE HAVE NO WATER!!!
The solvent is water-based solvent. You can't use flammable solvents in the thing. So that you don't end up spending money on water (and end up having to lug literal hundreds of pounds of liquid out of the store and into your garage, and so the store can actually stock the stuff) it's concentrated. For a parts washer you mix the stuff 10:1; one gallon of concentrated solvent makes eleven gallons of solvent after you've added the requisite amount of water.
But, of course, we have no water.
The damn water main could have broken yesterday, or tomorrow, or any other day; it broke today and it broke after I started working on this project.
And people wonder why I'm paranoid.