A pipe cleaner or chenille stem is a type of brush originally intended for cleaning dottle from smoking pipes. Besides cleaning pipes, they can be used for any application that calls for cleaning out small bores or tight places. Special pipe cleaners are manufactured specifically for cleaning out medical apparatus and for engineering applications. They are popular for catching drips, bundling things together, colour coding, and applying paints, oils, solvents, greases, and similar substances.
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Famous quotes containing the words pipe and/or cleaner:
“I am dead against art’s being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author—detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower’s pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl’s lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
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—Erma Bombeck (20th century)