Tool room humour

[Ian Johnson 1Participant @ianjohnson1]

This gave me laugh, while sorting out a box of cutting tools I came across these two HSS ground bits.

One has been ground perfect to 32 degrees zero minutes, and the other to 36 degrees ‘we hope’.

Nicely etched in by hand.  No idea who made them, when they were made or what they were used for! But they had a bit of banter between the tool room and shop floor.

IanJ

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

I like it!

I have, or had, a pair of odd-leg, or “Jenny” calipers that may have been made as an apprentice exercise. The two legs, of flat strip steel, are engraved with…. fish-net stockings enhanced by the edge-hook and scriber-holder being fashioned as high-heeled “kinky” boots.

I also had something really weird. A twist-drill of perhaps 4mm diameter, whose helix reversed from right to left hand half-way along its length. It looked as-manufactured, not someone’s idea of a joke by modifying a standard drill, and I though I know there are LH helix drills for special purposes, I haven’t the foggiest why a hermaphrodite one would be made!

[Nigel Graham 2]

On Nigel Graham 2 Said:

…
I also had something really weird. A twist-drill of perhaps 4mm diameter, whose helix reversed from right to left hand half-way along its length. It looked as-manufactured, not someone’s idea of a joke by modifying a standard drill, and I though I know there are LH helix drills for special purposes, I haven’t the foggiest why a hermaphrodite one would be made!

Just a guess, but specials made to speed up mass-production weren’t unusual.   They allow two jobs to be done with one operation, avoiding a time-wasting tool-change.

Maybe this example drilled through a body into a cavity and then carried on drilling on the other side.  The reversed helix would keep swarf produced by drilling the second hole from climbing the drill into the first hole and jambing it.  Swarf from the first drilling is ejected normally at the top, but swarf from the second drilling is kept in the cavity.

Dave

[VicParticipant @vic]

Good one Ian! 😆

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