O.K., this is pretty lame, but its the most I've gotten out of a 99 cent item!

I was looking for something to use to remove the snap on sunbrella covers around the boat so that I wasn't pulling up on (and tearing) the material each time I unsnapped the covers. I saw a snap tool in West Marine that was used for both putting on and taking off snaps. It was $16.95!!! I knew I could do better.

Then, one day, I'm in my favorite shopping mecca, the dollar store, and saw a stainless steel grill spatula for 99 cents. I stared at it for a little while, looking intently at the handle with a hole in it for hanging it up on the wall. "That hole looks a lot like the size of a snap", I said. Needless to say, and like so many items before, I bought it, took it home and cut it up.

This is what I ended up with. I cut off part of the black plastic handle from the spatula making sure I had only what I needed to use this part as a snap tool. Then I cut off the metal hanging end so that the hole was VERY close to the edge. Then, armed with my trusty Dremel tool, cut the hole out so that the it formed a "U" shape. Finally, I bent the metal at an angle, very much like the 17 dollar one I saw in West Marine. I drilled a hole in the plastic end for hanging somewhere.

The best part of this is that I still had a very useable grill spatula with about 4 inches missing from the end of the handle (it had a very long handle to begin with)! All for 99 cents (what a cheapskate)!