Re: What is it? XCVIII

[Tim Shoppa]

Some of the items in the unsolved

> set may have been correctly answered previously but I > wasn't able to verify them so I've included them > in this new post.

My one piece of insight to share on #471 is that if you look at the red numbers, they are different by 4 or 5 from the adjacent red numbers. With the exception of 9 and 0 (which are either 1 or 9 apart, depending on how you look at it.)

My gut feeling is that this dial is for remapping the 0-9 digits such that adjacent digits do not come out near each other in the remap, maybe something like a grey code. The 20-tooth cog and the microswitch-style rider look like something out of a phone pulse-switching system, although what kind of stepper switch they might control I still do not fathom.

Tim.

[BILL MARRS]

"563 Old carbon tet fire extinguisher

564 Saw set

565 Ice crusher?

566 ?

567 Ammo pouches---M1 carbine? Garand?

568 leather skiving tool?

[dhrm77]

566. A "Beauty and the Beast" edition of a candle holder ?

246. Tool box ? jewelry box ?

447. some tool to place or remove horse shoes ?

212. a square peg for matching square holes ?

244. it looks like a rope could be put around in the gap around the screw, and screwing the bottom part would hold the rope in place. better yet, an identical object like this one would have its loop fit in the gap. It could make a strange chain.

[else24]

543: Seems like long ago an old timer pointed to one of those and said it was a fencing tool. You looped the wire on one of the teeth and levered it against whatever was handy to tighten the wire, and you hammered staples with the hammerhead. How you held the wire tight while you removed the puller and switched to the hammerhead is unclear.

447: I did get pictures of that last fall. Well, I *took* some pictures. They didn't come out so good. I thought there was enough light but there wasn't. I've been working on some of them and if you want I can post the one or two that actually have something to see on ABPW later this evening. I believe there's one where you can clearly see this part as one piece of a one-man bucksaw. I haven't talked about it because I'm embarassed about saying I was going to take photos and then coming back with mostly pictures of a black cat eating licorice in a cave at midnight.

[Brooks Moses]

That's not what I know as a "fencing tool", but it certainly looks like it could be used for that.

The problem of tightening the wire and hammering in the staple at the same time was one that happened with the fencing tool I know of, too. What I remember doing was hammering the staple most of the way down over the wire, and then pulling the wire tight and letting the staple do most of the work of holding it there while I did the rest of the holding with a gloved hand. Also, if you pull the wire tight in such a way that it ends up wrapped partway around the fencepost, the friction against the fencepost will help hold it tight.

Of course, I was about 12 at the time, so probably what happened more often than not is that my father pulled the wire tight, and I used an ordinary hammer to drive in the staple. :)

In any case, the hammerhead on a fencing tool of any sort is primarily there for making occasionally repairs when you don't want to carry more tools around; for actually building a fence, it makes a lot more sense to use a proper hammer for the hammering.

- Brooks

[Rich Grise]

Maybe from an "Enigma" coder/decoder circa WWII. I'm almost sure I've seen such a thing before - the 45 degree bevel on the back is a dead giveaway that it stuck out from some console, but I can't remember for the life of me where I've seen it.

Thanks, Rich

[DoN. Nichols]

Too simple to be an "enigma", which used several rotors, with crossed wiring from contacts on one side to contacts on the other side, and some subset of them were rotated with each new character entered. There was a keyboard, which closed contacts, fed through all of the rotors (I think that the general one was three rotor, and the submarine force later got a four-rotor version), and the scrambled wiring eventually lit a small lamp behind the character which stood for the original one.

But it probably could be used for something like changing digits in a key code book for cutting a key from the number on the lock. (They would not want it to be too simple, but also not so difficult that a locksmith could not make keys at need.

Enjoy, DoN.

[Oleg Lego]

The machineman entity posted thusly:

566: Candle holder?

[Tim Shoppa]

I think it's more likely from a simple machine (not a "coder/decoder" like an Enigma machine) that has to scatter sequential digits such that the are not adjacent in the machine's operation. Don's suggestion of a key-cutter might be close, but it would do the mapping because you don't really want a key cut to pattern #4 to be close to a key cut to #3 or #5 (replace "key" with whatever this thing does! I think security/encryption is a bit of a red herring, it's probably something more to do with mechanical tolerances and not cutting a strip of something too thin or maybe something more like the utility of a hash index in computing.)

I can't rule out it being from some sort of encryption device but the mapping is so straightforward that it would provide zero real security itself.

And the fact that there are twenty teeth on the cog and twenty digits (two different colors) around the dial has to mean something, I just don't know what! Going back to the "hash index" idea, maybe there are ten useful doohinkeys in a machine, and they don't want to wear any out in favor of others, so at each shift change they advance the dial one and use that setting on the machine.

As to style, it's simplicity and lack of adornment suggests something like a East European public telephone from the 50's. At the same time, it looks like it was machined out of solid billet (aluminum? and really thick housing!) and not cast as a mass-produced item would be.

As enigmatic as Gary Larson's "Cow Tools" :-).

[R.H.]

I think that it's supposed to be a dragon, though the head of it is lacking in detail and is the weakest part of the piece.

Rob

[R.H.]

Sounds reasonable, though this tool doesn't look like it would be very comfortable to hold with a bare hand.

Yes, please post them, I just did a google search on bucksaws and didn't see anything like #447, so I'd be interested to see your photos.

Thanks, Rob

[DoN. Nichols]

[ ... ]

Note that when one of the digits on the dial is aligned with the leftmost index mark (clearly white), the red digits are visible through the holes. When one of the digits on the dial is aligned with the rightmost index mark (darker -- perhaps red), the white digits are visible instead.

The white digits are sequential, but in reverse order of the ones on the dial, while the red digits are scattered.

Using the white index, you have ten possible substitution patterns, depending on which dial digit is aligned with the index. Using the darker (possibly red) index, you have ten other possible substitution patterns.

Perhaps it is for something simple like obfuscating codes being broadcast -- say from a controller to police cars via radio.

The roller is not part of a switch, but rather just a detent, to hold the "dial" at its last setting.

The angled base suggests that it should be on a desktop or a console top. It is too dark to tell whether it has some drilled and tapped holes for mounting to the surface, or perhaps has a black felt pad to simply make it sort of non-slip.

Agreed -- but someone cared enough to do a nice job of engraving the digits and anodize the various parts rather nicely.

Enjoy, DoN.

[Oleg Lego]

The Robert Bonomi entity posted thusly:

Folks who made hats used to use 'carbon-tet', and it affected their brains. Hence the phrase "Mad as a hatter".

[Mark Brader]

Robert Bonomi:

Nope. That was mercury, not carbon tet.

[Glenn]

563 Fire extinguisher bottle filled with Carbontetrachloride IIRC

564 Saw Set

565 Wall mounted ice crusher

566 Cane topper?

567 Ammo Belt

568 Ice shaver for making shaved ice like snowcones.

[Han]

[e-mail] (Mark Brader) wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Correct. CCl4 gives you liver cancer IIRC.

[Mark & Juanita]

Thought it was mercury salts that did that to the hatters. The mercury salts were used for curing the pelts that went into the hats.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

[Matthew Russotto]

Heard the same story, but with mercury.

[Canem]

Actually it was the mercury that they used in hatmaking that affected them.

[Dan]

On Fri 20 Jan 2006 04:21:58p, "R.H." wrote in news:aodAf.27547$ [e-mail]:

That was my exact thought too. But there's that hammerhead right there, and if one assumes it's used the way one would normally use a hammer, then there's either a part missing that would cover up all those teeth, or people just put up with a lot of discomfort back then.

Or maybe both. :-)

Done. The subject is "One-man bucksaw - 3 attachments" but it looks like I'm not a very good usenet user either. One of the attachments didn't make it. Don't know why, I treated just like the others with PaintShop Pro to resize it, but two of them made it and one of them came through as gibberish text. Maybe I ought to send them just one at a time.

If you want the third one I'll repost it but I think you can get the idea from the two that made it. Let me know if you want me to try again.

Dan