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melannen (![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} melannen) wrote,@ 2009-05-10 17:30:00 |
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mother's day
The coolest things I found while helping Mom clean out Dad's workshop (*still* the best mad scientist lab ever! Even after she's cleaned it out about five times!):
1. A bolt about 5" long with a metal pulley on it. (The general coolness of pulleys cannot be overestimated. Once you figured out pulleys in Miner's Cave, you were golden.)
2. A thingy that you stab into a can that turns into a spout, for when you have a can with no spout that needs one, a situation that one surely must always be prepared for.
3. A huge bottle of muriatic acid. (We used to raid Dad's shop chemicals for our science experiments in middle school! How come he never let us use the muriatic acid? It's okay, though, we had a huge bag of CaCl2, so I figured out how to make my own.)
4. A sheet of radiation-shield glass. Just in case we ever need to put a glass window in a radiation shield.
5. Two giant suction cups connected to a handhold, like burglars use on plate-class windows in caper movies.
6. An old juice bottle with about a half-inch of white powder in the bottom, labelled "hydrated lime", and another old juice bottle half-full of pale blue liquid, with a tag tied around the neck that said
So question one, is the blue stuff Bordeaux mixture or pure copper sulfate? And question two, will Mom throw it out instead of devising an experimental protocol to answer question one? (Answer to question two: yes.)
7.
(photo under cut): it's approx. 3' long, and consists of 18" of broom handle socketed into about 18" of aluminum pipe, with gray pipe insulation along most of the length. The broom handle end is capped with an old detergent bottle lid, held on by a twist of wire. The pipe end is cut off in a long J-curve to make a sort of scoop, with the pipe insulation trimmed to match on that end, and it has a small L-bracket bolted to hang down into the cut-off part of the pipe, with a another small bolt about 2" farther down the pipe.
Whatever it was that Dad built it to do, I'm sure it did that thing very well.
...no one Mom has showed it to has even a vague hypothesis as to what Dad might have built it to do.
The coolest things I found while helping Mom clean out Dad's workshop (*still* the best mad scientist lab ever! Even after she's cleaned it out about five times!):
1. A bolt about 5" long with a metal pulley on it. (The general coolness of pulleys cannot be overestimated. Once you figured out pulleys in Miner's Cave, you were golden.)
2. A thingy that you stab into a can that turns into a spout, for when you have a can with no spout that needs one, a situation that one surely must always be prepared for.
3. A huge bottle of muriatic acid. (We used to raid Dad's shop chemicals for our science experiments in middle school! How come he never let us use the muriatic acid? It's okay, though, we had a huge bag of CaCl2, so I figured out how to make my own.)
4. A sheet of radiation-shield glass. Just in case we ever need to put a glass window in a radiation shield.
5. Two giant suction cups connected to a handhold, like burglars use on plate-class windows in caper movies.
6. An old juice bottle with about a half-inch of white powder in the bottom, labelled "hydrated lime", and another old juice bottle half-full of pale blue liquid, with a tag tied around the neck that said
1/2lb = 3/4 cup hydrated limeAccording to the wisdom of the Internets, Bordeaux mixture is fungicide for plants. The internets knows not of 4:4:48, but it suggests 4:4:50 for common diseases of, er, Cannabis sp. (Dad did spend his summers in the late '60s "finding America" with a motorcycle, backpack, and goatee, but he wasn't really the herbology type, I swear.)
in 1qt water (~=1lb:1gal)
1/4lb = 3/8 cup copper sulfate
in 1qt water(= 1lb:1gal)
1/2 cup lime sol ->
1/2 copper sulfate
+6 cupts h2o
~=7 cups 4:4:5048
Bordeau mixture
So question one, is the blue stuff Bordeaux mixture or pure copper sulfate? And question two, will Mom throw it out instead of devising an experimental protocol to answer question one? (Answer to question two: yes.)
7.
(photo under cut): it's approx. 3' long, and consists of 18" of broom handle socketed into about 18" of aluminum pipe, with gray pipe insulation along most of the length. The broom handle end is capped with an old detergent bottle lid, held on by a twist of wire. The pipe end is cut off in a long J-curve to make a sort of scoop, with the pipe insulation trimmed to match on that end, and it has a small L-bracket bolted to hang down into the cut-off part of the pipe, with a another small bolt about 2" farther down the pipe.
Whatever it was that Dad built it to do, I'm sure it did that thing very well.
...no one Mom has showed it to has even a vague hypothesis as to what Dad might have built it to do.
