<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN"> <html><head><style type="text/css"></style><title>Re: Decapping the bridge</title></head><body> <div>At 13:15 -0700 3/8/08, David Love wrote:</div> <div><br></div> <blockquote type="cite" cite>JDs method of removing the cap whole is pretty nice and fairly simple....Thanks JD for the suggestion.  Learn something new everyday...</blockquote> <div><br></div> <div>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.</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div><img src="cid:p06240801c4bbd4b8bc4f@[10.0.0.1].1.0"></div> <div><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000088">In Sheffield wages are better, and the external state of the workers<br> also.  On the other hand, certain branches of work are to be noticed<br> here, because of their extraordinarily injurious influence upon health.<br> Certain operations require the constant pressure of tools against the<br> chest, and engender consumption in many cases; others, file-cutting among<br> them, retard the general development of the body and produce digestive<br> disorders; bone-cutting for knife handles brings with it headache,<br> biliousness, and among girls, of whom many are employed, anaemia.  By far<br> the most unwholesome work is the grinding of knife-blades and forks,<br> which, especially when done with a dry stone, entails certain early<br> death.  The unwholesomeness of this work lies in part in the bent<br> posture, in which chest and stomach are cramped; but especially in the<br> quantity of sharp-edged metal dust particles freed in the cutting, which<br> fill the atmosphere, and are necessarily inhaled.  The dry grinders'<br> average life is hardly thirty-five years, the wet grinders' rarely<br> exceeds forty-five.  Dr. Knight, in Sheffield, says: {203}<br> <br>    "I can convey some idea of the injuriousness of this occupation only<br>    by asserting that the hardest drinkers among the grinders are the<br>    longest lived among them, because they are longest and oftenest absent<br>    from their work.  There are, in all, some 2,500 grinders in Sheffield.<br>    About 150 (80 men and 70 boys) are fork grinders; these die between<br>    the twenty-eighth and thirty-second years of age.  The razor grinders,<br>    who grind wet as well as dry, die between forty and forty-five years,<br>    and the table cutlery grinders, who grind wet, die between the</font></div> <div><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000088">   fortieth and fiftieth year."</font></div> </body> </html>