Sounds like you need to get a "pink wood strecther"
one of the things we used to
send noobs to the tool room to find.
I actually sent a guy to the hardware store once with a shopping list, in the middle of the list was "
spirit level fluid" he was there for hours.
Yah, when I was in the Navy we would
send guys for relative bearing grease, ten feet of chow
line, and a bucket of steam.
My favorite was when they gave me a
wire brush and told me to go to the electrical shop to have it rewired, so I went. The guy in the shop mixed a packet of
Bug Juice* in a gallon bucket of hot water, dropped the brush in, and said come back in an hour. When I came back, he took the brush out and rinsed it off in fresh water. It was shinier than it had been the day it left the factory!
*
Bug Juice: A Cool-Aid like drink served aboard ships in the Navy. It comes in powdered form in these little drab-brown packets with your typical military designation on them ("Mix, Beverage, Fruit, Powdered" - or something like that.) We would mix 14 or 15 packets of
Bug Juice and 20 or 25 pounds of sugar with water in a 55-gallon toureen in the galley. It made pretty good tasting Cool-Aid.
The real use for
Bug Juice was cleaning anything metal, especially anything intricate. Just mix and proceed as described above. Hey, it
beat cleaning a
three-way all-purpose fire hose nozzle by
hand!
Oh yeah. If you mix your
Bug Juice in a galvanized bucket, the submerged part won't be when you're done (galvanized, that is).