Chenier

4 hours ago, Frosty said:

Worse, some of the new ones aren't just inexperienced they're undertrained.

A friend of ours, now near retirement, was trained and worked as an ER physician before, umm, "settling in" to proctology. He says the watershed moment was the 2003 rule that medical residents could only work 80 hours/week over a 4-week period. Prior to that there was no hourly limit. The time period of the residency didn't change. Residency is where docs get all their post-med school training in their specialty. Our friend says the residents coming out of the system after the rule change only had about half the experience and specialty training of their predecessors and it really showed.

McMaster-Carr carries acme threaded rod, collars and nuts in diameters up to 2-1/2"

>> When you have to clear space on your bench to use the book ... <<

We ended up with a spare music stand from a local band. It's great for holding shop drawings, small binders, manuals etc. and easy to move around the shop to where you need it. One of its blessings is the stand isn't good for much else so it doesn't collect "stuff" that needs to be cleared away.

On the medeival theme: perhaps a shield with the seal and/or mascot of the school he's graduating from?

I thought of a suit of armor first, but the shield seems easier. Also more convenient than carrying around a lance.

Scott NC: Great photo(shop) of your Wahoo! Your avatar makes it perfect.

Those magnet fish I made aren't painted. I can paint worth bean dip. Got the graphics from the internet, scaled them appropriately, then glued them to a cedar board. Cut it out with a bandsaw, applied magnets and shellac. Voila!

Got my grandson a peewee fishing rod for his 3rd birthday, then decided he needed something to catch while we wait for the water to warm up. Made him a school of magnet fish.

The Magnet Fly could be good for steelhead, no? Might be blacksmith related - I had to flatten the bottom of the hook with a hammer to attach the magnet to it

>> Are there any anglers on here? <<

Umm, yeah. I usually fish for bass (smallmouth & stripers), pike, walleye, trout, steelhead, and salmon each year. Occassionally I'll go after bonefish & tarpon or go deep sea fishing. I think I need to broaden my repertoire...

This one was a first. It's a Perca, one of the few fish native to Patagonia. Caught it last month trout fishing down there:

TW - The hooks for curtains are available separately from the rings. Most of the curtains I've hung were that way. If you google images for "old fashioned curtain rings" you get lots of pictures of rings configured like those in the OP.

8 hours ago, Gazz said:

Would there have been a blacksmith shop to maintain ice working tools?

Your complex may or may not have had a blacksmith shop, as Thomas said. But if it did, the blacksmith was not located close enough to the ice house that you'd be finding pieces of his equipment under and near the ice house foundations. You simply do not put heat sources like a forge next to an ice house. It melts the ice. (I belong to a club that has a working ice house and we're really sensitive to heat sources nearby.)

A possibility is that after refrigeration came along, a blacksmith moved into the vacated ice house.

Frosty, in the pic the hull is angled away from the camera a bit, making it look shorter. The hull is essentially the same length as the boom - which is square to the camera.

There was a light breeze for the sea trial and she scooted right along. Manouverability was great. I'm giving it a thumbs up!

And I'm grateful there wasn't a heavy breeze. It wasn't warm enough for me to need a swim.

Sea trials complete. She didn't sink under the weight of all that bronze! (plus me  )

Thanks for the tip. Fortunately my audience is so wowed by the bling factor of the bronze that they don't notice it's been amateur hour at the anvil. I'm looking forward to doing some methodical skills-building now that the boat is out of the shop.

It's not the boat, it's the boatbuilder. 

Frosty - Wilco. I want to see her with the sail up!

Thomas - You're right, of course. But I have to call it "finished" or I'll fiddle with it forever.

Got all the hardware installed - she's finished!

Couldn't raise the sails in the driveway due to overhead power lines. Sea trials in May when the waters warm up a bit.

I was given one of those Logan 400's a year ago. Worked OK just plunking it in my shop - needs aligning and tuning, though. After I get the boat done and out of the shop...

This model Logan was designed primarily for screw & bolt making, hence the short ways. It's shorter length also made it popular in the home machinist market. Scott Logan of Logan Actuator still makes many of the parts (but not the castings) if you need 'em and has a lot of information about them on his website.

Rats, yes. They hitchhike on ships and get everywhere we have.

Coyotes, OTOH, are North American critters - not global. Wiki says one was spotted on the far side of the Panama canal in 2013 so they'll probaly claim South America in the next century or so. Unless ACME gets there first.

Irondragon: "I haven't shipped anything to Germany, but did ship a heavy item to England some tears ago..."

Using one of those slippery Freudian keyboards? :-)

Sodium is a solid at room temperature. Wiki says the melting point is 98ºC.

Sodium is violently reactive with water. It spontaneously dissasociates water forming sodium hydroxide and hydrogen gas. It gives off a lot of heat in the process which usually causes the hydrogen to burn and/or causes a steam explosion. My high school chemistry teacher demonstrated it.

I don't think it'd be safe to cut open a sodium-filled valve without a lot of specialized equipment and training. You have to isolate the sodium and sodium swarf from humidity in the atmosphere, for starters. Then heating it & pouring out the molten sodium sounds like one's worst nightmare about metal casting.

2 hours ago, George N. M. said:

The same thing happens in the legal/governmental area.  Often, you are given a time limit to speak and you have to condense what you want to say to fit it.

Yep. I used to testify a bunch to the City Council, where there was a 3-minute limit. I thought I got pretty good at it. Then I wound up actually on the Council itself and found that 95% of the time I could figure out the speaker's essential points in under a minute, even though they took their full time slot. Brevity is a blessing.

Old School. We cut them for consumption as ice (refrigeration and drinks) during the warmer months. Yes, the camp is a bit off the grid.

+1 on what George N.M. said. We have an old ice saw that was used for cutting blocks out of a lake - it's about 4 feet long with 1 inch teeth. These days our team in western Quebec cuts the lake ice early, before the lake *really* freezes, and extractst 12-inch blocks in December with chain saws. But ice fishing includes January, February and March, so you'll want a blade long enough for the worst case ice - not "ideal" or "average". 3 feet long with 1/4 or 1/2-inch teeth sounds about right. You might get away with shorter if you're fishing on a river.

In 1870 my great-grandfather was cutting and stacking ice at Fort Edmonton. I'm sorry, he didn't leave notes on what saw he used.

Finished turning the sheaves. Had to make the mast first so I'd know what diameter to make the masthead sheave ...

Not the smoothest machining in the world, but they should work. The largest of the three is from the billet I hammered out in July.

Depends on whether you're a coyote or a roadrunner.

An eye bolt is a good example of a symmetric wrapped eye.