Stranger than fiction?

[Ron Nossaman]

>The circumstances under which someone wants some of our stuff is usually
>unorthodox if not downright strange. My last request for piano wire was
>from a guy who wanted a foot of very small gauge. Turns out he wanted to
>drill the edge of a quarter, affix the piano wire, then proceed to chump
>the phoneco for LD charges by repeatedly dropping and retrieving the
>quarter from pay phones. I got out of that one by telling him that he
>needed the cheese slicer gauge, and that all my stuff was too big!
>
>At the other end of the spectrum, I found that K through grammar school
>teachers love used, clean action parts. It's amazing the projects they can
>come up with by using all or parts of various components.
>



I still get an occasional call from someone at Boeing (Wichita, yes... there
is one here too) wanting a pound of something in the .030" range (their
spec) to use as a half mile straightedge to align jigs and/or machinery.
When I open one of the (new) smaller gauge pounds and find the rusty hand
prints on the coil, I save it for the next Boeing call. It's the other five
or six pounds of larger gauge rusty stuff lying around that I'm not sure
what to do with.

 Ron N