It turns out that my furriers’ ring was still in my closet.  The ring diamter is 6” and the wire is 0.148”.  The latching mechanism is easier to see here.  The animal pelts would have been eviscerated and the wire would have been fed through the slit that ran from the chin to the tail and out through the jaws. 

I was told that the standard was for 10 pelts per ring.  We sold the rings for $0.35 each in 1980s.  The ad that I plucked the image from shows them at $16.00 each.  Maybe I should EBay my ring.
A perfect place for a scarf.

That is what 45 year old galvanized wire looks like (zinc oxide corrosion).

In the 1970s I was an independent sales representative for mechanical components.  One of the companies I represented made aircraft grade plastic fabrications. 

Their workmanship was so fine that the fused joints had no apparent seam.  The fusing became one homogenous piece of plastic.  The process was expensive.

I had a contract to produce 40 small instrument covers for a military contractor.  These were essentially a 1” x 3” x 4” box and they cost $40.00 each.  That would be $288.85 in current dollars. 

It was the perfect size box for paper clips, and that was what the receptionist was using one of them for. 

I said, “If I were you, I would very quietly throw that little plastic box away.  It is too scratched up to be used and it cost your boss $40.00.”

The receptionist went round-eyed, looked around and seeing no one watching, tossed the box in the trash.

Quote from: woodbutcherbower on January 24, 2023, 12:40 PM

I once caught my girlfriend scraping paint using one of my Kirschen chisels. The same day, I also caught her knocking a nail unto a wall using my rubber flooring mallet.

Did you get the poor girl a started set of household tools? Hammer, screwdriver, paint scraper, etc. 

Ages ago before Blue Spruce was bought by Woodpeckers, I was chatting with Dave Jeske about how many paint cans may have been opened with his pretty chisels. So I asked him to make me a paint-can opener à-la Blue Spruce:



He liked the result so much it was a one-time tool with a caption like "gift your wife a nice paint-can opener so she won't use yours". Seemed popular at the time

An old timer, when I was in my twenties, said he complained that his single edge razor blade that he put in his razor was dull after just one shave.

His wife replied, “Don’t be silly.  If it was sharp enough to cut some linoleum tiles, it certainly was sharp enough to shave with.”

Many years ago, you used to be able to buy “Spaulding High Bounce” pink balls for stick ball.  Those disappeared in the 1970s.

The High Bounce balls were actually quality control rejects from the Spaulding tennis ball production line.  These balls were rejected for poor bonding at the seam prior to adding the fabric surface.  They were re-packaged as stickball balls.

When the tanning ball production was moved offshore, that source of balls was lost. 

An avid stick ball player in Brooklyn addressed that void.  He took an old clothes dryer that no longer generated any heat, and lined the interior with self-adhesive sand paper.  Then would then load the dryer with tennis balls and let them abrade themselves until nude of all the fabric covering. 

He would make periodic checks to see if “it-was-soup-yet”.  Apparently there was no risk in over-cooking these.

Clearly these were more expensive, but they lasted far longer as they were not made from reject balls. 

I saw this on TV about 40 years ago in one of those how-is-it-made documentaries.

I have used the small commercial tumbler where I used to work to polish some wood handles (I think I used crushed walnut shells for that.  They came out perfectly smooth.

In years gone bye, wood garment hangers were finished by tumbling in huge tumblers with really hard paraffin wax.  All the current wood hangers I see have a sprayed finish.