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putting a Stabond order together

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Joseph has promised a raffle supply of ca for the Virginia Woodturning Symposium. he only ships fresh product, less than 2 months. Thanks to StarBond.
 

Bill Boehme

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... Haven't been doing any turning for a few months with the weather foul one way or another and you and I working in separate areas of the same shop if I recall correctly....

I've been meaning to talk to you about the thermostat in our shop. :D Yesterday it was almost hot here. I rolled the lathe out and made some shavings from a plum tree that we cut down last fall. You might see some of the red shavings blowing your way later today. This morning it is downright freezing cold in the shop. It's a good thing that I gathered up all of the brass monkeys yesterday and brought them indoors.
 

hockenbery

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I've been meaning to talk to you about the thermostat in our shop. :D Yesterday it was almost hot here. I rolled the lathe out and made some shavings from a plum tree that we cut down last fall. You might see some of the red shavings blowing your way later today. This morning it is downright freezing cold in the shop. It's a good thing that I gathered up all of the brass monkeys yesterday and brought them indoors.

Bill.
According to an old sailor long gone now:
Brass monkeys hold a pyramidal square of cannon balls on ships. When it gets cold the brass compresses more than the balls causing the pyramid to collapse.
:). Where did you put your 30 cannon balls? :)

We have bluebirds and chickadees building nests. Spring has spring here.
 
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Bill.
According to an old sailor long gone now:
Brass monkeys hold a pyramidal square of cannon balls on ships. When it gets cold the brass compresses more than the balls causing the pyramid to collapse.

That brass monkey story is extremely widespread but has nothing to do with reality. If nothing else, any attempt to store cannonballs stacked in that fashion would be extremely unstable and dangerous on any ship at sea.

See, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_monkey_(colloquialism)#Supposed_etymology
 
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yeah, one of us could do better!

I've been meaning to talk to you about the thermostat in our shop. :D Yesterday it was almost hot here. I rolled the lathe out and made some shavings from a plum tree that we cut down last fall. You might see some of the red shavings blowing your way later today. This morning it is downright freezing cold in the shop. It's a good thing that I gathered up all of the brass monkeys yesterday and brought them indoors.


Seems like with as many people as we have working in our shop somebody could take care of the thermostat! A warm day makes me think spring has sprung then a cold raw day makes me want to go back inside for a few more weeks. Funny, things have decided to green up and bloom around here regardless of the weather, seem to think they have been dormant long enough! In the swamp I didn't call it spring until our "Louisiana robins" came out. The little gators might come out early but when you see the big ten or twelve footers out it is spring.

Up here I watch the native pecans. Some of the fancy pecans and fruit trees get fooled every year but when the native pecans bud out it is spring. Got a dead pear to cut down now, hoping against hope it will decide to bud out but it was hit by lightning or something and died with the fruit half developed last year, think it is toast. I hate letting the wood decay but I sure would like to get some more pears off of the tree if it decides to come back!

Hu
 

Bill Boehme

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Yesterday I was sitting on the deck enjoying the warm day -- dyeing some curly maple, seeing all the birds chirping, trees breaking bud, grass greening up and today there is about a half inch of sleet on the deck -- looks like another setback for spring. Normally, I have the 'maters and 'taters already planted.
 
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could be a lot worse

Yesterday I was sitting on the deck enjoying the warm day -- dyeing some curly maple, seeing all the birds chirping, trees breaking bud, grass greening up and today there is about a half inch of sleet on the deck -- looks like another setback for spring. Normally, I have the 'maters and 'taters already planted.

My friend up at Vail usually grows a nice garden, would be greenhousing tomato plants by now. He is the guy that decides how much deicing the roads need, snowplows, salt, crews. He has to make sure it actually happens too even if it means driving a plow himself. He has been a little busier than usual this year!

Hu
 

hockenbery

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not exackly!

That let all the air out that ballon. -:(
Thanks


Al,

Few places have larger volumes of misinformation labeled as fact than wiki and snopes. I always get a little chuckle when either one is used as a source to prove something factual or false in news reports.

Ship at sea seems debunked just by common sense, you really don't want a bunch of cannon balls rolling around breaking the legs of your own men in a sea battle or just a storm. However I have seen fortifications on land with the cannon balls stacked in a pyramid. Did they ever use a "brass monkey" to secure them? I would speculate that the actual action to dislodge the balls would more likely be a rain and freeze causing ice to push the balls apart. Could have happened once, sometime, somewhere, could have been something totally unrelated to cold that dislodged the pyramid, could have been only a ball or two fell and the story grew.

Stories are told and retold. As people try to make it real to the person they are telling it to the people and places involved change. Then the debunking people come along and debunk the altered story.

Easy to prove something possible, it only has to happen once. Much more difficult to prove something impossible because you have to prove there is no set of circumstances that it could have happened in. For example, the cannon ball pyramid on a ship doesn't make sense. However, that doesn't mean that it wasn't tried by someone that was used to seeing the pyramids in fortifications. Perhaps a few balls dislodged by ice and wave action on a cold night started the story. Also very possible the story started from balls dislodged from a pyramid at a fortification. We imagine all the balls dislodged but the story might have started from only a few falling. Of course there is always the possibility that the story is purely a tall tale without the slightest shred of truth!

Part of the mystique of these tales, we never quite know if they have any basis in fact or not. Some of the most preposterous are very close to true. For example a man working for me did cut off a telephone pole over thirty feet in the air with a '65 Mustang on a flat road after hitting another car and lived to tell the tale. He had the newspaper article to prove his story. I wonder how far that car would have flown if not caught or slowed by the pole, telephone wire, and power wires?

By the way, I caught a black panther in my live trap last night. We have been rumored to have black panthers in Louisiana all my life, here is the proof. He is big and black and certainly thinks he is a panther! Might be just a feral house cat though . . .

Hu
 

hockenbery

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Al, By the way, I caught a black panther in my live trap last night. We have been rumored to have black panthers in Louisiana all my life, here is the proof. He is big and black and certainly thinks he is a panther! Might be just a feral house cat though . . . Hu
We are way OT now.
The tale was actually told to me by a retired admiral.
Regarding your black panther. A few years ago three of us saw the largest bobcat I have ever seen it was about a half mile away walking away from us down a clay/lime rock road. It looked to be 3 ft high at the shoulder. While we were watching it we all agreed it was one huge Bobcat. Once it disappeared we talked ourselves into believing it might a panther to the point that we searched for about half an hour before finding a confirmable bobcat track in the hard road. We do in fact get panthers in our area and two have been killed on I4 between Tampa and Orlando in the past 10 years.
 

Bill Boehme

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I don't suppose that either of you yarn spinners have seen this item on brass monkeys from the Naval History and Heritage Command web site -- your tax dollars hard at work to answer life's most persistent and perplexing questions.

BTW, Mr. Squeak, my avatar kitty believes that he is a panther -- he told me so himself and ... don't ask how we communicate. I don't want to hurt his feelings so I haven't told him otherwise. So, how goes the Starbond order? See -- I managed to not wander off topic even a little bit. :D
 
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I don't suppose that either of you yarn spinners have seen this item on brass monkeys from the Naval History and Heritage Command web site -- your tax dollars hard at work to answer life's most persistent and perplexing questions.

I seem to remember that it was a different part of a Brass Monkey's anatomy that was liable to be frozen off . . . :D
 
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dogs and cats and starbond, a bear tossed in no extra charge!

Critters like cats and coyotes with a lot of fur can seem huge at a distance and it seems like sometimes the air itself magnifies things or there is an optical illusion that makes the animal seem far bigger than it should look at the distance. The biggest dogs I ever saw were up a hill from where I stopped to tighten binders on my eighteen wheeler load. After several stops there curiosity got the better of me and I walked up the hill. English Bulldogs! They looked much taller from the bottom of the hill. :)

We get the occasional puma from Texas way or Florida panther from the other direction. We once had a population of one or the other as well as our own unique Louisiana black bear. We still might have a few mated pairs of cats. We get a slap on the wrist if we shoot a puma and it is a major aw-pooper if we shoot a Florida panther. Sure wish y'all would put labels on them things!

I just put together a Starbond order that was largely a sample. I will have almost everything they make when that order gets here, I did skip the pink glue, don't think I skipped anything else I didn't already have. I am getting the various thicknesses, colored stuff, super strong super glues, and the odor free. I'll be able to glue everything around here and I'll know what to order from them next time around!

As for threads getting derailed, I'm a thread derailing son of a gun! Generally my own threads though.

Hu
 
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when it's mine

That is sort of sad when you have to hijack your own thread. :D


When it's my thread it isn't a hijack for me to derail it. In semi-governmental parlance it is a temporary refocusing of the area of specific interest of the current document. In my own terms, if I'm not learning at the moment I figure I should at least be having fun!

Hu
 
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