7 ms·
Unboxing a vintage gear set
- Jacq5 8y agoSeems still better than my wives when I am back drunk.
- sctb 8y agoPlease post substantively or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- userbinator 8y agoThis could be the "waxy" coating on them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmoline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmoline
- monochromatic 8y agoDoesn’t look like cosmoline to me, too solid. I think wax is right.
- hansthehorse 8y agoCosmoline is the bane of World War rifle collectors. It soaks into the wood and is almost impossible to get completely out. I spent a week cleaning a Finnish Mosin and still didn't get it all.
- monochromatic 8y agoYeah, I've done that drill myself. It's not fun, but you just have to keep reminding yourself that the rifle would be rusted to hell without the cosmoline.
- unwind 8y agoThe wax in the article is green (and called so by the author), but that wikipedia page states that Cosmoline is always brown in color. So it doesn't seem very likely, even though it seems to be the proper context (naval hardware).
- jonhendry18 8y agoI can't see putting cosmoline on the outside of a box. It'd be really messy for quite a while. A fast-drying sealing wax sounds more likely. Especially since the gears themselves don't seem to be loaded up with cosmoline.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoMan, gear from the 50's should at most count as "retro", vintage gear to me sounds more like something from the early 19 century. Gears are hella old!
- jonhendry18 8y agoEarly 19th would be "antique".
- blt 8y agoWhat is special / unusual about the splines? ("Check out those cut splines in the middle!") It looks like normal spline drive to me.
- jnellis 8y agoNothing. I used to work in a gear shop. These are/were done with a broach, no skill required.
- fermienrico 8y agoYou want to be careful about the foam padding. There is a possibility that it could be made from Asbestos.
- Aloha 8y agoThat seems like an unlikely use for asbestos - asbestos was mostly used when a heat retardant was needed.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoIt had some really surprising, and quite common, uses in the war through to 70's era. Fabrics, cigarette filters, paints, fillers as it was so cheap. Heat retardant and insulation were the headline uses.
- jonhendry18 8y agoFloor tile. Used in the US into the mid 70s. Lots of it still out there.
- chrisdhoover 8y agoAs a certified gear head, this post brings me great joy. Along with the reddit post where some dude proved some test wrong by modeling the gears, I’ve had a geat week and it is only Wednesday. Now to go shift my 901 transmission some more.
- war1025 8y agoDo you have a link to the reddit post? That sounds interesting
- jacquesm 8y agoThose look fresh as the day they were made. The real engineering is not in the gears by the way, but in the cutting machine that cuts the spiral gears. Cutting straight gears is hard enough, spiral drive ones are impossible without special machinery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT7GMUiEp7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT7GMUiEp7c (never mind the audio and the intro...)
- kragen 8y agoCan't you cut helical gears with a lathe and a two-axis contouring milling cutter? Or is that not precise enough? (Or are you just saying that a lathe with live tooling is "special machinery"?)
- jacquesm 8y agoI've had a lot of tooling, including lathes, mills, plasmacutters and welders, never had a setup that could have cut helical gears with any fidelity. I think it is special machinery if you won't find it in 90%+ or so of well equipped machine shops.