Chore Boy

Chore Boy is a brand name for a coarse scouring pad made of steel or copper wool. It is designed for cleaning very dirty surfaces, especially washing dishes. During the first half of the 20th century, the product was marketed under the name Chore Girl.

Chore Boy is also the brand name of hi-tech labor-saving dairy milking systems and an associated line of fluid-handling equipment that was produced between the 1960s and 1980s.

Drug paraphernalia

In the American drug-using community, especially in more urban areas, Chore Boy has garnered a rather large market as a makeshift component in do-it-yourself crack cocaine pipes.^[1] Utilized in this context, a small wad of the copper wool (the steel variety will not suffice for this purpose) is inserted into the end of a short cylindrical glass tube (sometimes called a "straight shooter") and serves to function as a screen and/or a matrix by which the melting freebase can be thoroughly dispersed across the large surface area of the copper wool. This is in fact somewhat similar to the function served by the copper wool which is packed into distilling columns used in fractional distillation set-ups; however, a variety of other materials might also be used to achieve the required increase in surface area within a column, including but not limited to glass beads/pieces, silica gel, steel wool, bits of ceramic, etc.

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