Odd Lots
- Someone asked me via email the other day: How thick is 16 gauge aluminum? I’m old: My first impulse was to grab my caliper and measure some. My second impulse was to google it. This answers the question, for steel as well as aluminum.
- The page cited above is part of a large and fascinating Web compilation called “How Many?” and it’s a dictionary of measurement units. Other tabulations include shot pellet sizes and the Danjon scale for lunar eclipse brightness.
- Metallic cesium figures, um, explosively in my novel Drumlin Circus. You can evidently distill it on your barbecue grill. I’m guessing you shouldn’t do that right before a thunderstorm, however. (Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.)
- Speaking of explosions, here’s a map summarzing the legality of fireworks by state. I thought more states restricted them than actually do. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- It’s not brand-new, but I stumbled on the Actobotics product line in the latest edition of Nuts & Volts. It’s a very nice Erector/Meccano-ish system with more robust parts & real metal gears. No, not cheap–but neither was Meccano, at least on the scale I used it when I was building things like The Head of R&D.
- If you’re interested in following the progress of the recent collapse of sunspot activity, don’t forget Solar Ham. More data than SpaceWeather, and you don’t to know anything about amateur radio to find it useful. Given that the peak of the current solar cycle was probably this past March, coming down so hard so fast is something of a phenomenon.
- There is a utility that finds loops in videos suitable for making animated GIFs. Sometimes technology advances the human condition and sometimes, well…
- There’s something called the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, and if the maps are to be believed, I may be speaking it, though it sounds New Yawkish to me. This is a tweak on Inland North American English. Somebody oughta do an app that can tell me what accent I actually have. I’m a Chicagah boy but have been told I don’t sound like one. (Thanks to the Most Rev Sam’l Bassett for the link.)
- Pete Albrecht sends us a list of current and defunct bookstore chains worldwide. I spent so much money at Kroch’s & Brentano’s 40 years ago that the place should still be around but, alas, it’s not.
- If you’ve secretly longed to see a photo of Alfred Hitchcock eating a giant pretzel, or classic mustard ads of the 1950s, well, it’s all here. (Yes, I’m a sucker for vintage weirdness, but this is good vintage weirdness.)
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · language · robotics · science · weirdness
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A state may allow fireworks, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t banned on a more local level. California is listed as allowing fireworks, but Mendocino County (where I live) bans them. I believe that Sonoma County (to the south of me) allows them, but some cities within it do not.
Here in Pennsylvania we have a fireworks store near the Maryland border. You can buy the big fun fireworks there as long as you do not reside in Pennsylvania.
From their website:
PA residents may only buy sparklers, novelties, poppers, snaps, smoke items, spinners, and fountains (certain restrictions may apply in some areas). We have over 200 items of these items to choose from. A Local Permit from your local municipality (township or borough) is required to buy items that explode and/or go into the air, and items such as Firecrackers, Rockets, Roman Candles, Mortar Tubes, Multiple Shot Items, etc.
The Florida fireworks law sounds a lot like Pennsylvania’s, *BUT* the stores can waiver you on-premise for uses such as stump removal, scaring birds out of your crop fields, etc etc, with their eyelids getting tired from the wink-wink the whole time.
Gauge:
Actually, the answer is more complex than that. In the last 25 years or so, the charts are probably good enough. If you’re looking at a prewar issue of Model Engineer”… who knows?
If you look at Machinery’s Handbook and older engineering texts, you’ll find that “gauge” often depended on what material you were measuring. Aluminum, brass, steel, gold, all were different. And sometimes it would depend on which industry you were talking about using it in. And then they were slightly different between British, American, and French standards.
Even now, gauge is only a rough guide. Due to trying to rationalize some interchange between various standards (“so many too choose from!”) the tolerance on thickness is quite wide, nearly 10% on some sizes, though almost all vendors hew to the minimum thickness to maximize their margin.
You’d buy a piece of sheet metal to make an air conditioning duct by gauge, but if you’re doing engineering, you’d normally call out .039-.043, .059-.064, etc. just to make sure, particularly if a foreign supplier was involved anywhere in the chain.
Whoops, hit Send before I was done…
> I’m old: My first impulse was to grab my
> caliper and measure some.
With your caliper you KNOW. Good engineer-think there.
One problem with the Google is that you can search until you find the answer you’re looking for… another is that concensus doesn’t mean correctness.
“A man with one watch knows what time it is. A man with three is never sure.”
One wonders why the How Many site would not avail itself of Machinery’s Handbook…
Actobotics is a worthy find, and I shall have to explore there when I can make some time. Not cheap, as you say, but neither is Stock Drive Products, which offers one of the few other sources for many mechanical items. ServoCity does have some relatively inexpensive motors. But the small selection of chain products prompted me to wonder why there is only 0.25″ in metal chain–there are smaller chains made, and for small devices, 0.25″ seems like overkill.