Initially I thought it was a clay pigeon, but on second viewing, the sides appear too tall and the whole thing is not aerodynamic enough, and you're right - if there's any paint of them it's just a splash of color on the top. Others voted for the base of a judge's gavel, but those are usually varnished wood (more impressive that way) and the bases would match, so I can't see that either. Balance scale weights do look similar, but those are usually just cast iron or brass and not painted. It looks ceramic - I wonder if it's just the top of some jar or an insulator?
Yeah that was the other thing rattling around in my head. The paint job on it is real slap dash crap job, you can tell by looking at the inside corners. I was thinking ceramic as well, like it has a bad glaze on it.
1031 resembles a spacer/protector used under bed legs to reduce floor damage. Similar things have been used with liquid in the cup to prevent insect access from floors to beds or food storage units.
1031) This looks like a clay pigeon to me. I don't think that I've ever seen one of this color -- but I haven't seen many anyway. :-)
1032) O.K. This thing is designed for releasing a cable under heavy load. The pin with the ring holds it locked when you absolutely don't want it to release. Then, you connect a lanyard to the eye in the lever just behind the piston, pull the pin, and pull the lanyard to release the load.
The piston appears to serve to control the release rate -- perhaps so a flip of the lanyard won't release it -- it will require a steady pull. Or perhaps (can't tell from this view), there may be provisions for applying compressed air to the piston the move the lever.
In any case, when the lever moves far enough, the spring loaded hook at the left-hand end snaps up and releases the load.
1033) Looks like some form of flail -- for separating the grain from the stalk.
1034) Hmm ... a dead-blow hammer -- with lead shot (or something similar) inside the tube. When the face of the hammer hits the workpiece, the shot keeps hitting the back of the face for a while after that, preventing the hammer from bouncing and thus transferring the maximum energy to the workpiece.
1035) Is that perhaps a shot tower? Molten lead was poured from a series of apertures, and allowed to fall a certain distance before landing in water. The shot cools enough in the air and produces a rounder shot with little work compared to other methods.
1036) (a) You look down into the hole and the mirror bends your line of sight until it is parallel with the long dimension of the level. It probably acts as a right-angle telescope, and is sighted on a distant reference of some specific height, and the rise or drop is measured by the dial on the side.
(b) A similar function, without the built-in telescope, so you either simply rest it on what you are measuring, or sight along the top edge. The upper scale is obviously calibrated in degrees, which makes me question the lower one, since its pointer appears to be at 7.5 half inches per foot, or 3.75" per 12", or 17.3540 degrees, which certainly disagrees with the other hand indicating about 32 degrees. After all -- it does appear that all four pointers are a single piece, and thus rotate together.
I think that the partially obscured top label says "clinometer", but I am not sure about the bottom one.
What looks like corrosion is probably just chipped paint, but it's definitely a clay pigeon, they were made in a wide variety of colors, sizes and styles. This is a fairly old one, it was photographed at the Trapshooting Hall of Fame.
According to Knight's American Mechanical Dictionary, published in 1876 (and available in reprint from Lee Valley), the "Shot" entry, sheet iron was used:
"A shot-tower is usually about 180 feet high, and 30 in diameter at the bottom, 15 at the upper story, where the melting is conducted in brick furnaces built against the wall around the central opening down which the melted lead is rained into a water-tank at the base of the tower....The method of reducing the lead to a shower of drops is either by pouring it into a sieve or by pouring it out of a wide ladle which has a serrated lip. The lead flows out in a number of streams, which break into separate drops, the resistance of the air and their cohesive tendency causing them to become spherical in falling....
The colanders or sieves are hollow hemispheres of sheet-iron about 10 inches in diameter, and the size of the holes is as follows for the respective sizes of shot:
The colander is faulty in respect of its delivering the stream at greater rapidity when full or nearly so, than when nearly empty, owing to the variation in pressure of the metal as it decreases in depth. It is now generally superseded by the ladle, which has a serrated side to divide the lead into streams equal in number to the serrations...."
I was wondering how the hot lead got to the top of the tower.
I was thinking that it was melted on the ground, and some poor slob was given a 100-lb. bucket of molten lead and told to go climb the stairs with it. "...upper story, where the melting is conducted ..." clearly indicates that it was melted upstairs.
This means that both the lead and the wood for the fires had to be lifted. I assume an ox or horse hauled a rope over a pulley.
Thanks for posting that, I changed the answer page to read "copper or sheet-iron sieve", I found quite a few places on the web where they mention copper being used so I kept that part. I would have replied sooner but I was out of town this past weekend.
There's a bit missing from the history of the first shot tower, in Bristol UK (I live nearby). Although that was indeed the first tower, his development of the process began by him using the stairs inside the house and extra height down into the cellars _beneath_ the house. The house was built in "Redcliffe", a sandstone bluff overlooking the harbour that had long been hollowed out into storage vaults and cellars linked into the houses above.
The tower was demolished in the '60s for road-widening, but was replaced by a new concrete tower. It's no longer in use, but is still standing.
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