Thursday, August 2, 2007



1049. Nose fuze from a mortar rocket or artillery shell, I haven't been able to confirm what it's from specifically but there are some similar ones here.

Larger image













1050. Grounding block for an electrical panel:

From Simon's collection.











1051a. This is a row marker for an old corn planter, a friend who knows a lot about them gave me this description: "The small end was mounted in the center of the planter with a hinge type device that allowed it to travel in an arc from the ground on one side of the planter to the other side. When traveling through the field it was making a mark on the side of the planter next to the unplanted land. The mark was made all the way through the field and this mark was followed with the planter to maintain the same distance apart each trip. At each end this marker was changed to the other side.


1051b. The heavy cast iron item below is also a marker, these were used with grain drills, one on each side and were attached to the back corners and dragged through the field. The person driving the team of horses could keep the end wheel of the drill just inside the drag mark.












1052. The description on this tool read "special purpose military hammer, by W.M. & S., England, 1917", so it was produced during WWI. Other than its use as a screwdriver, I don't know exactly what it was for.















1053. Fiber optic magnifier, made from over 15,000 tapered fibers. Created by heating the central region of a cylindrical bundle of fused optical fibers, pulling it into an hourglass glass shape, and then cutting it in the middle. Lots of drawings can be found on the patent page, number 5,600,751. These are also made to be used as part of night vision scopes.

For more guesses on this one and a chance to win a t-shirt, take a look at Neatorama.














1054. Slater's axe, aka sax, saxe, slate cleaver, slate cutters' trimmer, slate trimmer, and zax, used to cut, trim, and punch holes in roofing slate.



































































Last week's set is seen below, click here to view the entire post:








More discussion and comments on these photos can be found at the newsgroup rec.puzzles.