Re: What is it? XLVI

[mkolb]

Maryann

"Anything can be anywhere!"

[Frank McVey]

Hi, Glenna Rose.

Sounds similar to the one my mother has. Sometimes, if you have an awkward shaped piece of meat, such as a whole ham, it's easier to carve taking horizontal slices, rather than the more usual vertical ones. To do this, most right-handed people would stab the fork in horizontally from the left, hold it in their left hand, then carve towards it from right to left with the knife. In this situation you are working the cutting edge towards your left, and if the knife slips, it's apt to ride up the fork and be guided by it straight into your left hand.

If you hinge up the little guard, it will stop the knife reaching your hand in the event of a slip.

HTH

Frank

[Tom]

Known as a guard rest, offers protection from the knife and as you surmise, a rest for the fork.

Tom

[DoN. Nichols]

[ ... ]

Look at the back. There should be a 3/8" hole in the center.

Loosen the three black screws (only one shows in the photo, to the right of the lock tab). The counter will lift off. Then you should be able to lift the knob free of the back. You will find room in the back of the knob to accommodate the 3/8" diameter mounting bushing of a potentiometer, a flat washer, and a thin nut -- the kind normally used for mounting pots and rotary switches on old electronic equipment.

Now -- in the back of the knob should be a 1/4" hole, and there should be two setscrews at the back of the knob (probably hidden by the skirt) which can be tightened by a long skinny Allen wrench to lock the knob onto the 1/4" shaft of the potentiometer.

When the knob is mounted on the shaft, turn it fully CCW. Reach into the back of the counter mechanism, and turn the gear there until the counter reaches zero, slide it back onto the base with the screws passing into the slots in the skirt, and tighten the screws. At this point, your knob should read "000" with the pot fully CCW, and some value when the pot (it should be a 10-turn one) fully CW. Ideally, it should read "999", but based on your counting the turns vs digits, it probably won't. (Unless you were determining a full turn by a visible hole for a setscrew, and missed the fact that there are two at about 90 degrees separation in the knob.

I *have* used this kind of knob, though more recently I have mostly used the more shallow versions which I described in my last quoted paragraph above. IIRC, the photographed style, I last saw in

*new* use around 1960, used to build things like temperature controllers for test ovens for semiconductors which had to meet tight specs.

If you have no future need for it once the contest is over, I might be interested in acquiring it from you. I have not seen that style for a long time.

Enjoy, DoN.

[Rich Grise]

page 10 so on.

Cheres! Rich