Sunday, May 16, 2010

Separation Anxiety

Been a bit busy lately as Felice had to fly out to Albuquerque earlier this week to help her folks out for a few days. She's back now. But I much prefer this type of separator:

Picked it up at a yard sale for Kent as he likes blacksmithing ephemera. I'd love to know the story behind it. I also found a variable speed Delta scroll saw, which I've been wanting for a while.

Since I couldn't get into the shop much while watching the kids 24/7 (or more accurately, 24/4) I spent a good deal of time continuing work on my first (in a long while) computer program. It's developing nicely but I had to ressurect all the dormant trig in my brain. I'm still using "Just Basic" which is simple enough that I can code without looking stuff up every two minutes. Most Basic commands are etched in my brain. But the whole GUI thing took a bit of effort to get right. The program is a simple conversion of a linear g-code axis to a rotary axis, but I'm adding in a bunch of functionality. A nice hobby activity.
This trig. page was quite helpful. As was Machinery's handbook.

At the last open shop night a fellow named John Heinz showed up. He makes some interesting tools! He came over later in the week to borrow the use of my surface grinder but we couldn't get the chuck to hold the M4 steel with enough force to surface some tiny plane blades.

Speaking of blades, my airgun co-blogger Derrick sent me a link to his uncle's knife blog. Great writing and stories.

2 comments:

Lizard said...

Nick,
it's an egg separator. a completely idiotic thing to make, IMO, because you can either use your hand (the easy way: pour in egg, let white seep through fingers into bowl, when all white is gone, dump yolk into another bowl) or you can use the egg shell (not as easy, but far from difficult enough to require a tool: shift yolk back and forth between halves of the shell while the white dribbles off into a bowl).

Your egg separator appears to require you to crack the egg and carefully pour it onto the separator so the yolk falls perfectly into the central cavity while the white dribbles around it into the bowl you have presumably sat the contraption upon.

seems silly, but I have to say its purpose was immediately obvious to me, cooking geek. sorry it isn't a blacksmithing thingie.

Felice Luftschein said...

I know it's an egg separator, hence the title of the post! I agree, no need for one. Myself I use one half of the shell to the same purpose.
What I do want to know is why this blacksmith thought it would be good advertising. When was the last time you even saw a blacksmith promotional item?
Nick