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Neat Stuff From Old Tool Box

johnoder

Diamond
Joined
Jul 16, 2004
Location
Houston, TX USA
Fairly sure I acquired this as part of a stack from a party retiring from Enpro Systems over twenty years ago
 

Attachments

  • Chordal Lengths.jpg
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  • Draft Angles A.jpg
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  • Draft Angles B.jpg
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  • Shrink Chart A.jpg
    Shrink Chart A.jpg
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  • Shrink Chart B.jpg
    Shrink Chart B.jpg
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Nice find, Mr. Oder !

The artifacts themselves are useful quick references for patternmakers (draft angles) and <s> machinists (press fits) </s> <On Edit:> [sic!] My gaffe: the second table is also a patternmaker's reference - for shrinkage of cooling metals. See John's Post #2 below. <End Edit:>

This is the best sort of "swag" that a salesperson can hand out: it's so useful that it will probably be retained for years, and it keeps the vendors name "front and center" in the customer's mind. Contrast this with a calendar; the customer will keep it for a year. These reference cards were kept until retirement!

Beyond the artifacts themselves is the history of the company which printed them. A quick search showed that William Sellers was an important figure in the history of Midvale, and that Fredrick Taylor worked there too:

Midvale Steel - Wikipedia

Anyone else have any Midvale-Heppenstall artifacts?

Young Machinist: "I could look that up on my smartphone using voice recognition!"
Old Hand: "Yes, but not as quickly as I can look it up on the card thumbtacked to the wall over the bench!"

John Ruth
 
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Every time a new apprentice bought his own 12" rule we used to ask the kid " Have you had that checked out ? ".
Obviously the kid would say " No, I don't think so ".

So we'd reply " You need to get over to the pattern shop son, they have the master rule, they'll check it out for you".

Of course when the kid offered them his rule the pattern shop guys would check it out against their " metal shrinkage " rule.

They'd tell the kid - " You need to take this back to the hardware shop son, look it's wrong compared with our master ".

Much confusion on behalf of the apprentice. We did eventually tell them the truth.

Regards Tyrone.
 
We were introduced to the shrink rules in our freshman year at Brooklyn Technical High School, when we took a very basic wood patternmaking course, along with a similarly basic foundry course. The patternmaking teachers had been patternmakers in industry before becoming teachers, and one related a story of deliberately mixing up the shrink rules on another patternmaker after he was into a job, just to drive him crazy.

My own sequel to this concerns what is known as an "engineer's rule" vs a regular rule. Back in 1973 or thereabouts, I was working for Bechtel on the construction of Millstone II nuclear power station. I was assigned to second shift, and given a gang of pipefitters to work with me. We were finishing up some system piping in the "secondary plant" (steam side of the plant) and running some temporary carbon steel piping as part of the startup flushing, chemical cleaning and buttoning up of various systems. The crew foreman was a hard-bitten old pipefitter from New London. He'd started in the Electric Boat shipyards working on submarines, and nothing was too hard or impossible in this fellow's book. His nickname was "Shag". Shag did not tolerate any BS or lame excuses from his crew.


One of the pipefitter journeymen assigned to our crew was a character named Rioux (pronounced "Rio"). Rioux was a real problem. He was an alcoholic, lived in a roached-out old Cadillac, and was erratic in his work habits at best. One of the provisions of the contract agreement with the Pipefitters Union (known as the "UA") was that every pipefitter, whether apprentice, journeyman, or foreman, was to have a 6 foot folding rule on him as a personal tool. This point in time pre-dated the widepread use of steel tapes. Rio had already endeared himself to the rest of the crew by his lack of bathing (he reeked of somer kind of cologne) and coming in late or not at all, or not in a condition to function properly. The crew doused him with a bucket of water and Lysol to teach him a lesson in that department. Rio found a way to bathe when he was off work.

Rio kept showing up without a 6 foot folding rule. Shag had assigned Rio to layout and burn off pieces of 6" and 8" black carbon steel pipe and grind weld bevels on them. Whatever his other faults might have been, Rio was a good hand with a torch and could burn and bevel pipe fairly well. Each shift, Shag would have to loan Rio a folding rule and give him a list of pieces of pipe with the lengths to be cut and bevelled. Shag would give Rio a "Wraparound", striker, goggles, center punch, hammer, , angle grinder, and soapstone and tell him to get moving. This worked fairly well and kept Rio doing something useful. At the start of one shift, Shag had enough of Rio's BS. Shag got the shop steward, and they laid the law down to Rio: if he was not in on time the next day with a 6 foot rule of his own on his person, he would be fired.

By some miracle, Rio showed up on time that next day to start the second shift. Shag asked if he had a 6 foot rule on him and Rio pulled out a 6 foot wooden folding rule. Shag remarked that putting the fear of firing into Rio might have worked. That feeling was short lived. Halfway into the shift, the pipefitters who were to fitup and weld the pieces of pipe cut by Rio got hold of Shag, and they all went on the warpath for Rio. It seemed Rio had "borrowed" a 6 foot folding rule on his way through the change shack (where the men changed clothes). Rio had evidently showed up without the folding rule, so grabbed one out of the clothing of someone on day shift. In his haste, Rio had grabbed and "engineer's rule". This type of rule reads in tenths and hundredths of a foot. Rio had evidently grabbed that folding rule out of one of the surveyor's coats or coveralls. Rio did not notice the difference and figured he'd found a rule that was lots easier to read than one graduated in 1/16ths, inches and feet. He'd been using the tenths of a foot graduation as inches- and a tenth of a foot is 1.200 inches, closer to 1 1/4". The pipefitters had been fitting and tack welding some of what Rio had laid out and cut and suddenly realized things were way off. Shag and the shop steward fired Rio right then and there and everyone heaved a sigh of relief. How anyone who claimed to be any kind of mechanic could fail to notice the difference between and engineer's rule and a "regular" rule is hard to imagine. Mixing up shrink rules is a bit harder to detect, I think.
 
Every time a new apprentice bought his own 12" rule we used to ask the kid " Have you had that checked out ? ".
Obviously the kid would say " No, I don't think so ".

So we'd reply " You need to get over to the pattern shop son, they have the master rule, they'll check it out for you".

Of course when the kid offered them his rule the pattern shop guys would check it out against their " metal shrinkage " rule.

They'd tell the kid - " You need to take this back to the hardware shop son, look it's wrong compared with our master ".

Much confusion on behalf of the apprentice. We did eventually tell them the truth.

Regards Tyrone.

I bought about a dozen shink rules off PM, they were cheap and eventually I'd like to mess around with pattern making.

Every time I see them I have to remind myself that no, that's not a 12" scale, go find something else.
 
I had not heard of Chordal Lengths before. I did a little reading.

Chord (geometry) - Wikipedia

Does this Chordal Length chart give you the length of a line inside a circle that runs parallel to a diameter line depending on how many 'slices' you take across the circle parallel to the diameter line?
 
Self Explanatory

The first column is number of divisions such as in a bolt circle

The second column is the chord value related to the diameter between any two of those equally spaced divisions

Its practical application was laying out a bolt circle with very little more than what was in your tool box. Note upper right MILLWRIGHT TRAINING

I had not heard of Chordal Lengths before. I did a little reading.

Chord (geometry) - Wikipedia

Does this Chordal Length chart give you the length of a line inside a circle that runs parallel to a diameter line depending on how many 'slices' you take across the circle parallel to the diameter line?
 
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V&T Dept.?

John,

The top left heading of the Table of Chords is not clearly legible. It seems to say "L-something College T&V Dept."

Or something like that. Any idea what College it is? T&V could be Technical and Vocational.

Thank You for posting this.

John Ruth
 
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Lee College - where ever that might be. I think the one Robert E. Lee was president of after his soldiering days was Washington & Lee? Robert passed in 1870 at age 63 looking for all the world like he was at least ninety.

John,

The top left heading of the Table of Chords is not clearly legible. It seems to say "L-something College T&V Dept."

Or something like that. Any idea what College it is? T&V could be Technical and Vocational.

Thank You for posting this.

John Ruth
 
Regarding Joe's story when I was working on marking out and inspection one of the rules on the table was graduated in 1/10 ths. From time to time you'd inadvertently pick it up to use. You soon realised the error of your ways though.

I used to work a guy who we called Mr Perfect. He was the turner ( lathe op ) that never ever made a mistake. He was notorious in the shop for it. It was never his fault, it was the lathe,tooling, material, the rain etc but never him.

One Xmas my grandson was given a joiners kit, his dad my eldest boy, is a carpenter. In the kit it had a plastic dial caliper that was pretty realistic and worked quite well. When I saw the caliper a light bulb went on in my head. I said to the grandson can I borrow this for a week ?
When we went back to work after the holiday I took it with me and awaited my opportunity.

It wasn't long in coming, Mr Perfect sent around a batch of about 20 large studs for inspection. I lined them all up on the marking off table and got the caliper out.

Then I went around to see him at his lathe. I said " You better come and have a look at all those studs you've just done Louie, they're all about 5 thou undersize on the major diameter ". He says " They can't be, but I'll come and see for my self ".

So we trot off to the marking off table. When we get there I hand him the plastic caliper and I say " Here measure them yourself if you don't believe me ".

He takes the plastic caliper in his hand and stares down at it for what seems like ages. Then he says " Bastard ! " , flings the caliper half way down the shop, and storms off back to his lathe.

Sorry to derail the thread.

Regards Tyrone
 
I can't resist following up on Tyrone's great post about the plastic dial caliper:

My father had a plastic Vernier caliper meant for use in fractional inches. It had an actual Vernier scale, but the result was in 1/128ths of an inch rather than 1/1000ths. Neither of us had seen the likes of this before. I will say that it took me a while to figure out what was going on.

I later acquired a steel Vernier caliper with the same scheme: result in 1/128ths. This one has stamped, rather than engraved, markings. It's marked by Disston, the saw makers.

IIRC, the main scale reads directly in 1/16ths, and the Vernier would split each of those 1/16ths into 8 equal parts, for a resolution of 128ths.

(If you are interested, the calculation of Vernier scales for every sort of fractional measurement is clearly explained in the 11th Edition Encyclopedia Britannica, circa 1910.)

Now, back to our regularly-scheduled program.

The coolest thing I ever found in an estate sale toolbox was returned to the estate cleaner who agreed to return it to the deceased's family. It was the man's company ID badge and a very old-time Union dues book that had stamps indicating dues payments. The book was decades old when I saw it. It seemed to me like a nice small memento of the man, something the family could keep in a scrapbook or memory box. The estate cleaner had the same reaction.

John Ruth
 
Lee College - where ever that might be. I think the one Robert E. Lee was president of after his soldiering days was Washington & Lee? Robert passed in 1870 at age 63 looking for all the world like he was at least ninety.
John,

Lee College used to be over in Baytown way back in the 1980's. It's changed names called something else today.

Ken
 
I have from my father a Helios brand sliding vernier caliper, graduated in thousandths of an inch on one edge and 128ths on the other. Probably the one I learned to read a vernier on.

I was having one of my kids check measurements on our never-ending house-building project, a couple of years ago. I told her to grab a 50-fot tape from the cubby where such things are found. She came back very perplexed by the measurement..until I showed her that she had grabbed the feet-and-tenths-and hundredths engineer's tape.
 
I have from my father a Helios brand sliding vernier caliper, graduated in thousandths of an inch on one edge and 128ths on the other. Probably the one I learned to read a vernier on.

I was having one of my kids check measurements on our never-ending house-building project, a couple of years ago. I told her to grab a 50-fot tape from the cubby where such things are found. She came back very perplexed by the measurement..until I showed her that she had grabbed the feet-and-tenths-and hundredths engineer's tape.

" Helios " made good calipers.

Regards Tyrone.
 
Every time a new apprentice bought his own 12" rule we used to ask the kid " Have you had that checked out ? ".
Obviously the kid would say " No, I don't think so ".

So we'd reply " You need to get over to the pattern shop son, they have the master rule, they'll check it out for you".

Of course when the kid offered them his rule the pattern shop guys would check it out against their " metal shrinkage " rule.

They'd tell the kid - " You need to take this back to the hardware shop son, look it's wrong compared with our master ".

Much confusion on behalf of the apprentice. We did eventually tell them the truth.

Regards Tyrone.

My old fathers favourite trick! He did that to me as well
 
Right up there with what we used to do with new recruits who came aboard that old tin can I was on in 1980. Would send them to the bosun's locker to get 50 feet of water or shore line. Or to one of the fire rooms to get a BT punch (BT: Boiler Tech).
 








 
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