[TheForge] [OT] Re: Cats, boots (Was: chickens)

[Mike Spencer]

Bruce wrote:

> For "wedge" read "screw" and all your objections disappear. 

I know this isn't what you're referring to but it's related:

I was fortunate to be able to take "print shop" in 9th grade.  I
printed up forms for a bogus laboratory that allowed me to order a lot
of dangerous and otherwise unobtainable chemicals.  But that's another
story.

The print shop had really cool devices called quoins, pairs of iron
wedges which, when put together on a flat surface, formed a unit with
parallel sides and a toothed groove down the center.  The teeth formed
a kind of diagonal rack gear.  A corresponding tip on a T-handled tool
made a pinion.  When the hand-set type was ready to go, it was placed
on a stone surface inside a steel frame -- a "chase" -- and the extra
space mostly filled with blocks of polished hardwood.  But space was
left for the quoins, which were inserted loosely and in pairs on at
least one side and one end.

Then you inserted a wrench -- the pinion-like tool -- into a quoin
pair and twisted.  That forced the wedge-shaped halves to bypass each
other and exert enormous force on the block of type.  When this was
done on both sides or all around, the type was "locked in chase" and
ready to go to the press.

Alas, I've never come across any of those quoins to put in my tool box
but I have come across some places where they'd have been handy,
places where I wanted to exert considerable force from the inside of
something outward but had severe space limitations.

In earlier centuries, printers used wooden wedges tapped into place
with a hammer.  The iron ones, though, always impressed me as a
landmark of technological and blacksmitherly cleverness.

I don't *think* that's way off topic.  Opinions may vary. :-)

- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^