Mr. Rawles,
My wife and I have been regularly using [the V2830 Foodsaver that was purchased during the recently-ended sale], and we love it! I thought you might want some feedback that could be valuable to your readers. We have #10 cans of freeze dried food (as I’m sure many of your readers do). The disadvantage to opening a can to eat some is that once you open it, the clock starts ticking on how long it will stay fresh. Our solution? We use wide mouth mason jars, pour the #10 can’s contents into the jars, and use the V2830 to seal the wide mouth lid onto the jar. This means we can take our time with eating the contents, as opposed to eating the same thing on a regular basis before it goes bad. I know I can eat the same thing every day (parents raised us this way, did lots of gardening, canning, stocking up on food and items, et cetera.)
So now you have a #10 can that is empty and perfectly usable. What to do with it? We put all of our canning lids and bands into the various jars, label them, and throw those #10 cans into our storage area! Lids are easily stacked, but not the bands. However, the #10 can holds about 20 wide mouth [canning lid] bands. I create a column of bands, and around it I put bands on their side. I stumbled upon this experiment this morning as we were doing some vacuum sealing and trying to reduce clutter. Our kitchen and storage area are much more organized now from reusing the #10 cans to hold other items.
The #10 cans are perfect for holding anything, even ammo! I will be making a metal handle, poking it through both sides of the #10 cans, folding the metal over on the inside of the can so it won’t come out, and wrap some electrical tape or rubber around the handle so you have a makeshift bucket. Please pass this along to your readers, especially the idea of saving things to reuse them.
Thank you for all that you do. – Lee H.