Cable splicing vises

[ThomasPowers]

Ah yes the bad old days; "They're thirsty in Atlanta and there's beer in Texarkana..."  Coors was not pasteurized and so had a more limited shelf life and so a more limited shipping range. 

I learned to drink beer in Geology Field Camp; West Texas in August and beer was cheaper than Coca-Cola.  Now I prefer the Dunkel Doppelbock's but have been cutting way back with my Diabetes becoming more "fussy" with alcohol.

I first read of the Beer theory of civilization in Alexei Panshin's "Star Well" a long long time ago...

[Daswulf]

I haven't met a doppelbock that I haven't enjoyed yet. The first was Ayinger, still a favorite. The latest I tried was Troegs. It was good, and the price wasn't too bad. The price makes it for special occassions. 

[Frosty]

I don't know about that Das, it doesn't take much to make beer. Maybe if you start with the raw materials, even then it's not much, toast then crack the grain, boil it and when it cools add yeast. Modern home brew is easier, fill a plastic "vat" stir in a can of malt X lbs of sugar and yeast. Some people get fancy and filter it before bottling but its not necessary.

Real beer is packed with food value Billy, more so than commercial breads, "enriched" or not. Beer is a high value food, packed with carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins and minerals. If you live in primitive conditions say no refrigeration or way other way to preserve food beer rules. You boil the mash to convert starches to sugars and it sterilizes the sometimes nasty available water and it contains alcohol. 

You can't keep bread or even grain over winter without spoilage. If you have a proper silo or good grain storage it will last but even high tech modern farms loose stored grain to the blue fuzzies. 

The pyramids were built with beer, laborers were paid largely in beer. Bread was around just not common staple like it is today. Cheese, fish, vegetables and beer make a surprisingly healthy diet.

And yes, beer made Egyptian engineers smart enough to make those giant pyramids nearly perfect squares aligned with certain star groups and the sloping sides align with sunrise and sets. They surveyed with knotted string and straight sticks. 

The Egyptians were beer smart. 

Frosty The Lucky.

[JHCC]

6 hours ago, Frosty said:

The pyramids were built with beer, laborers were paid largely in beer. Bread was around just not common staple like it is today.

In ancient Egypt, breadmaking and beermaking went hand-in-hand, and both bread and beer were provided to the pyramid builders. There have been excavations at Giza that have given insights into both the methods and scale of the bakeries that provided food for the workers.

http://www.aeraweb.org/lost-city-project/feeding-pyramid-workers/

As for my own beer consumption, I generally drink whatever my neighbor across the way has brewed recently. He's doing a lot of experimentation prior to opening his own brewpub (for which I will be making the tap handles), so he puts out an APB (not to be confused with ABV or IPA) whenever there's something new or when he needs to finish off a keg to make room in the keezer. Most recent were a very good coffee stout, an excellent red ale, and a delicious winter ale; we're waiting for the announcement that the pilsner has finished lagering.

[Frosty]

I hadn't seen that one John, thanks. The articles I'd read some time ago were evidently too focused on beer. The evidence they gave for bread not being a staple was the lack of ovens in any number. If you use what we'd call a "dutch oven" there wouldn't be ovens. 

What the article describes is almost exactly how I bake in a dutch oven. Preheat the pot and lid while the dough rises a last time. Melt a little butter, drop the dough in and cover it with the lid then scoop ashes with a FEW coals around and on top. 

If your staple bread was hard and heavy you'd need something to dip it in, a broth or beer or even just water. Not quite hard tack but they treated the pyramid work crews pretty well so I'm betting on a broth, maybe fish and veggies.

Thanks again John, a good read.

Frosty The Lucky.

 

[TWISTEDWILLOW]

Lol, well I learned several new today!

beer make you smart, it’s easy to make and it helped build the pyramids!

[JHCC]

One thing that struck me when I first found out about ancient Egyptian bread was how its shape was so unlike any other bread I'd encountered. We're so used to thinking of "bread" as something made in rectangular pans or baked without a pan on a hot surface (such as baguettes, boules, etc) that the double-conical shape of a loaf baked in a bedja looks as strange to our eyes as a loaf of Wonder Bread would look to an ancient Egyptian.

[Frosty]

I don't know about being a double cone shape. (I'm sure there's a proper name and it will come up presently) The impression I got was the bread batter didn't rise much and the lid cone was there for heat.

If bread baked in a dutch oven raises to contact with the lid it tends to burn. I try really hard to keep a finished "loaf" to a bit over half the dutch oven. 

When I get unbusier I'm going to have to do more searches about Egyptian bread.

Frosty The Lucky.

[JHCC]

As I remember, the thing I first saw had some illustrations (from ancient sources) showing a biconic shape ("bicone" being the technical term I should have used; a "double cone" in geometry is something else). That was a while ago, however, and I may be conflating the shape of the bread with the appearance of the lower cone with its conical top.

And here's an article describing some experimental archaeologists attempting to make bread thus:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X20304223

[ThomasPowers]

Filtering greatly reduces the food value of Beer as the yeast carries a lot of the B vitamins in it. Vegemite and Marmite are both based on the yeast filtered out of beer and are extoled for their B vitamin content.  (Back in the 1940's my Mother in Law was advised to drink a quart of stout a day while breast feeding for the vitamin content---lots more fun than taking a pill!)

OTOH I had a friend doing his own beer brewing who didn't filter out the unprocessed hops he was using---you had to strain it through your teeth and spit out the "hay" in it. Only being free made it drinkable!   Give me gruit any day!

[Frosty]

Yeah you really need to strain beer some additives aren't very swallowable. A number of acquaintances in the 70s were using other "herb" flower colas for hops. Strange brews and and didn't have much of a shelf life even refrigerated. 

Frosty The Lucky.

[ThomasPowers]

Excellent beer for Pizza Parlors to sell.

[Frosty]

Now that recreational use is legal a couple of the brew pubs around serve their own version. I may visit one someday, have a burger and a brew if I'm feeling rich and hungry.

Frosty The Lucky.

[ThomasPowers]

My wife is having me build a set of raised beds for gardening, (attached the used livestock panels today---I asked her if she was humming "The Beverly Hillbillies" theme as I did it...), anyway I've been asking her if she is getting a permit to grow hemp---for her spinning of course.  I'll have to get rid of the unwanted leaves and buds for her...(The answer was *NO*!   We did have a nice picture of her standing in a hemp field in Germany at an open air museum...

[Frosty]

Reassure her you'll put the vats to process the hemp far enough down wind from the house she'll never smell a thing. The stalks and stems need to decompose to free up the fibers in a useful condition and it gets pretty wiff.

Frosty The Lucky.

[TWISTEDWILLOW]

I’ve had several commercial Mara G Wanna  growers bring machines to the shop for repair, 

the way they talk about it sounds like there’s a difference between the hemp plants an the other plants raised for medical/recreational use, I thought they was all the same plants

[George N. M.]

Since they are grown for different reasons, fiber vs. canniboid compounds it is no surprise that they would be different.  Think cooking apples vs eating apples or meat sheep vs. wool sheep.  Lots of varieties within the same species.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[Frosty]

True words George but good cannabinol strains still have stalks and stems and Mrs. Thomas probably isn't going to produce manila cordage in quantity.

Frosty The Lucky.

[George N. M.]

Ooo, ooo, I get to pick a nit and it is not often I get to do so with you, Frosty.  Manila rope is actually made from the abaca plant which is a type of banana, not hemp.  It is called "manila hemp" but that is a misnomer.

You are correct that retting flax plants can get pretty smelly.  Probably not as bad as tanning leather but you still want it down wind.

GNM

[Frosty]

Nice try George. Manila is a color not a fiber, plant. A manila envelope by any other color isn't a manila envelope.

Retting! I knew the term but would've still been staring into space if I'd tried to remember. Not many things are smellier than tanning. Well maybe a cadaver "farm" where they train CSIs and such. I hear they're put a LONG way from neighbors.

Frosty The Lucky.

 

[Malleus]

Interesting vise.  I've never even seen one.  As far as beer...  I'm definitely not a connoisseur. (yes...  I had to look it up too.)  However, I do like to try different beers when traveling abroad.  I like Kirin while in Japan.  Red Horse, from the Philippines will nearly knock you down. For that reason, I prefer their San Miguel.  Stateside, I usually stick with Bud Light, Shiner Bock, Blue Moon, or whatever my neighbor offers me.  I have been known to drink PBR, but that stuff usually gives me a headache the next morning.  I've never been a huge drinker, but the older I get, the less I drink. 

[George N. M.]

Frosty, to quote from that impeccable academic source, Wikipedia:

Manila rope is a type of rope made from manila hemp.

Manila hemp is a type of fiber obtained from the leaves of the abacá. It is not actually hemp, but named so because hemp was long a major source of fiber, and other fibers were sometimes named after it. The name refers to the capital of the Philippines, one of the main producers of abacá.

As they say, "manila" (capitalized or not) can refer to a color, a fiber, or the city.

I agree about cadaver farms not being a good up wind neighbor.  It is probably hardwired into us but a decomposing human smells worse to other humans than a decomposing anything else.  From some experiences in Viet Nam I can attest that it is really, really bad and gets into your hair and clothing.  Ugh.

A paper mill is pretty bad too.

GNM

[TWISTEDWILLOW]

I dunno about Nam George,

But I once had to haul off a dead llama in the dead of summer in 100+ heat, 

An where I was told to dump it was a place on the farm where they dumped dead cattle in a pile…

talk about gag a maggot off a gut wagon!!! 

when I was a kid I lived on a commercial chicken farm with 19 thousand birds per house an 10 houses, an we had to pick up the dead every day as well as cull the bad ones,

then dump em in a dumpster an move to the next chicken house,

an it was pretty regular the dead haulers skipped the farm an the birds would rot for another week,

but that smell didn’t compare to hauling that stinking llama to that pile of dead cattle!

[ThomasPowers]

One factor in hemp vs Cannabis growing is plant spacing.  For fiber you want them tightly packed so they grow tall and that lowers the THC content.  For Cannabis you want them spread out to get a lot of sun to increase THC content.  Of course there are a lot of cultivars bread for more THC these days. 

[Jobtiel1]

IIRC for hemp only the male plant is grown, while for Cannabis you need unfertilized female plants.

~Jobtiel