What is it? LXXIII

Aug 04, 2005 26 Replies

Posting from rec.crafts.metalworking again:

418) I saw a mention of this as being spikes for logger's boots when I entered this thread at the wrong point, so I can't claim a guess on this one.

419) Perhaps part of a cell phone? Where would I have seen it? I don't watch much TV, and I don't read popular magazines, so if those were possible places, I would not have seen it.

420) Pipe ID deburing reamer -- held in standard old drill brace (hand-cranked drill with a shape like this;

|-+ +===---\\\\>

| | +-====-+

(view with a fixed pitch font like Courier to avoid image distortion)

421) The function of these is to punch one to four equally spaced holes across the width of something.

If the spikes were not metal connected to the metal frame of the pliers, I could see it as being used to probe a flat cable of some sort.

As it is, I think that it is for punching holes across a leather belt to allow lacing it to another similar belt (probably the other end of the same belt) to produce a continuous drive belt. The smallest such drive belt that I have seen was 1" wide (used to drive lathes or milling machines), but I could imagine one which was smaller -- perhaps in something like a tape recorder, (except that the variations that the lacing would produce would introduce speed errors into a recorder).

422) This looks to me to be a traveler's portable sundial. The compass is to properly orient it, and the two angled boards (whose angles are set according to the traveler's current latitude) are to read the time -- one for the Northern hemisphere, and the other for the Southern hemisphere.

It would help to be able to read Chinese, which I can't, so I can find no confirmation for my guesses.

423) Old-fashioned sheep shears -- with broken blade tips. These look to me like what would have been used in a shearing shed in Australia.

Enjoy, DoN.

My guess is that it is for the southern hemisphere. The shadow would rotate the opposite direction, so having a second one calibrated for that would save applying corrections.

Enjoy, DoN.

421 Ticket collector's punch - adjustable for different routes.

Posting from rec.crafts.metalworking...

My answers for most of them have been offered by others but I think 419 is a small section of an etched circuit board. The rough edges imply chemical etching behind a mask but it looks to be gold clad instead of copper so I'm guessing they're connector contacts for something.

Best Regards, Keith Marshall snipped-for-privacy@progressivelogic.com

"I'm not grown up enough to be so old!"

I was going to facetiously suggest that, but facetiously suggested a moondial instead.

ISTM it would be much simpler to put a second set of characters on the dial for Southern hemisphere use, as opposed to another entire dial. Besides, it looks like the scale is different on the two dials.

[ ... ]

O.K. I already thought that Feng Shui was weird, but now I consider it *very* weird. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

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