Decapping the bridge

[John Delacour]

At 13:15 -0700 3/8/08, David Love wrote:

>JDs method of removing the cap whole is pretty nice and fairly 
>simple....Thanks JD for the suggestion.  Learn something new 
>everyday...

Terrific!  Glad it worked.  Thank the old world.  By the way, that 
knife I used with the stag handle is 100 years old and the Sheffield 
firm that made it at the time was turning out about 3000 of these per 
day.  Last night I began re-reading Frederick Engel's "Condition of 
the working class in England in 1844", a book I recommend to anybody 
who thinks life is hard today.



In Sheffield wages are better, and the external state of the workers
also.  On the other hand, certain branches of work are to be noticed
here, because of their extraordinarily injurious influence upon health.
Certain operations require the constant pressure of tools against the
chest, and engender consumption in many cases; others, file-cutting among
them, retard the general development of the body and produce digestive
disorders; bone-cutting for knife handles brings with it headache,
biliousness, and among girls, of whom many are employed, anaemia.  By far
the most unwholesome work is the grinding of knife-blades and forks,
which, especially when done with a dry stone, entails certain early
death.  The unwholesomeness of this work lies in part in the bent
posture, in which chest and stomach are cramped; but especially in the
quantity of sharp-edged metal dust particles freed in the cutting, which
fill the atmosphere, and are necessarily inhaled.  The dry grinders'
average life is hardly thirty-five years, the wet grinders' rarely
exceeds forty-five.  Dr. Knight, in Sheffield, says: {203}

    "I can convey some idea of the injuriousness of this occupation only
    by asserting that the hardest drinkers among the grinders are the
    longest lived among them, because they are longest and oftenest absent
    from their work.  There are, in all, some 2,500 grinders in Sheffield.
    About 150 (80 men and 70 boys) are fork grinders; these die between
    the twenty-eighth and thirty-second years of age.  The razor grinders,
    who grind wet as well as dry, die between forty and forty-five years,
    and the table cutlery grinders, who grind wet, die between the
    fortieth and fiftieth year."
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/20080803/eb7b9430/attachment-0001.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: turner_knife.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 38490 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/20080803/eb7b9430/attachment-0001.jpg