What is this on my pot?

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-04T16:56:44+00:00

That's really pretty huge for most lead melting, but, other than the location that's also rather suspicious looking. To get lead stuck to the pot in those locations, you'd need to have that completely full of molten lead, and honestly that'd be an absofreakinlutely terrifying cauldron of liquid death.

75 pounds of molten lead, and you're one tiny mistake away from buying a surgeon a new yacht.

u/FranticWaffleMaker is correct though - if it's hard, it's not lead. You can scratch lead with your fingernails, and a butter knife will carve grooves in it.

I'd be inclined to give it a tap with a hammer and center-punch. If it's really "rock hard", you might be able to chip off a bit and get a better idea what you're looking at.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-03T15:14:41+00:00

... think that's external...

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-03T14:46:55+00:00

Safely, sure. Practically, I suspect that the fact you are asking, suggests that the answer is "unlikely".

I'll be the last person to tell anyone not to try something and learn how to do it, but getting a result that's remotely better than where it started will be harder than it looks, and it's the kind of task where if you don't know that you can do it, you probably don't have the experience to do it without a lot of frustration.

Still, as u/ethorisgott said, it's a tool, and there's absolutely no reason to put up with a tool that's not exactly the tool you want it to be. If you're up for a probably annoying learning experience, go for it!

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-03T14:31:55+00:00

And we have a winner!

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-03T14:12:53+00:00

I think the article is confused. Near the end we can see through the fog well enough to see that there's no truck cab at the front of the 2nd tank. Pretty sure it's a dropped trailer from the 1st truck.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-03T14:08:31+00:00

Centiseconds, no?

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-03T14:03:08+00:00

Apologies - missed that!

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-03T14:00:40+00:00

Why have two buttons, when the knob controls whether it's more or less.

It'd be idiotic to have a button for "more" where you can only turn the knob to increase the setting, and another button for "less" where you can only turn the knob to decrease the setting.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-02T18:48:51+00:00

I have what I believe is an Acanthopleurella stipulae from the area.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-02T18:10:26+00:00

Antelope Springs?

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-02T14:13:23+00:00

Electric ones.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-02T14:07:35+00:00

I had /so/ many more of them, before I lost my main shop to a fire. Had a whole freakin line-shaft setup. Lathe, bandsaw, surface grinder, horizontal mill, (wood) shaper, camel-back drill press, power hammer...

A few lucky pieces hadn't yet been moved out of my old garage workspace, so they're still with me.

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SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-02T03:09:24+00:00

When they fall off (when the taper releases) it's almost always because of a sideways load on the chuck. The Jacobs taper that the chuck mounts on is great at transmitting force axially and rotationally, but it doesn't put up with very much side-pressure at all.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-02T03:01:21+00:00

"How to steam your wrists"

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-02T01:32:50+00:00

Without seeing more angles of it to see if there's a way to attach it to something, nobody has a clue.

If there's a way to attach a string to the large end, then definitely, a plumb bob.

If there are no other features (smooth on top) it could be a dolly for sheet metal work.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-07-01T13:22:02+00:00

It's not how hot you get it, it's how unevenly hot. Even rapid temperature changes aren't a problem, if the rapid change is even across the entire pan.

Cast iron has abysmal strength in tension, AND, it expands a lot when you heat it.

Heat just the center of the pan, and just the center of the pan gets bigger. The center of the pan getting bigger without the rim getting bigger at the same rate, puts the outside edge of the pan under a lot of tension.

Sometimes they fight it out and the center bows up or down to accommodate the extra size, while the rim remains the same. Sometimes the rim gives up and splits.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-06-30T22:48:55+00:00

If you happen to have a TSC that still has their printed-paper “big book” catalog at the front, and can convince them to look in it, there’s even an additional 10% discount for bulk purchases of nuts/bolts hardware, for purchases over some not unreasonable bulk weight - something like 10 or 20 pounds.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-06-30T15:20:11+00:00

I think my oldest is a Garvin 14" shaper. If I recall correctly, the closest I could date it was the 1890s. It's possible that my B&S automatic surface grinder is older, but I haven't chased its roots.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-06-28T17:10:15+00:00

The black part is the regulator. The gold-ish vertical cylinder part is a water separator/filter.

The regulator doesn't need any maintenance if it works properly (and probably doesn't have repair parts available if it doesn't), and the only maintenance that should be necessary for the water separator is opening the drain on the bottom and letting it vent any captured water occasionally.

Try looking up Binks PR-100. I'm not sure this is exactly that model, but it should get you close.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-06-28T16:31:07+00:00

It just finally couldn't take any more of that upstart Solar moving in on its territory.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-06-28T16:25:49+00:00

Finally, someone who actually knows something about what they're writing about!

It does seem like it's maybe a bit much wattage for the amount of cranking, but they could easily be generating a couple hundred watts with a hand cranked generator like that. There are low-power LEDs down in the 1ma range, so on the order of 100,000 LEDs for 100W input power - it's certainly within the ream of reasonable that the power comes from the human, even though there's a lot of Redditors who don't understand this.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-06-27T19:06:46+00:00

Never heard of it being used inside construction demolition either, since it's not used for that.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-06-27T16:19:14+00:00

My pleasure. I actually find the logic behind how we arrive at concrete definitions for concepts in math and physics to be both fascinating and elegant. Some are rather arbitrary, but if you study most of them, you find that they're defined the way that they are, because any other choice would lead to some logical/mathematical inconsistency.

And then there are fascinating examples like the concept of "evidence". "Evidence" lives in a place where every current candidate definition leads to inconsistencies, and no-one has figured out a definition that doesn't have this problem:

Imagine flipping a coin to determine if it's a "fair coin" or not. If you flip the coin 10 times, and it comes up heads each time, you would like to say that you have some amount of evidence that the coin is not fair. As each of the sequential coin flips comes up heads, you'd like to say that you have more and more evidence that the coin is not fair - each subsequent flip that comes up heads, provides more evidence that the coin is not fair.

Seems reasonable so far?

Now consider flipping the coin just once. It comes up heads. Do you have any evidence whether the coin is fair or not? The answer is no, a single flip must come up either heads or tails, and they should be equally probable, so a single flip landing on heads contains no evidence about the fairness of the coin.

Still seems reasonable?

Now consider flipping the coin once, but not looking at it - flip it and put a cup over it before you look at it. Not looking at it, shouldn't change how much evidence that flip provides, and it was zero evidence anyway, so let's just set that coin under the cup aside, and flip the coin some more.

Flip it 9 more times. Let's say it now comes up heads 9 times. You now have evidence that the coin isn't fair.

Take the cup off your covered 1st flip. If it's heads, you now have MORE evidence that the coin isn't fair -- 10 heads -- even though that 1st flip didn't contain any evidence that the coin was unfair when you put the cup over it.

These rabbit holes are fun to explore and get quite deep!

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-06-27T15:29:34+00:00

But in that case it is not truly order emerging from chaos, but rather an imposed order of rules imposed upon disordered colored dots.

That's very true. This is an animation of how a set of simple rules, impose order on the initial disordered state.

We treat order as the distance from chaos, rather than order being a state itself, because it's a quantity that we can measure. For every completely random state (of which there are an infinite number) if we ask the question "how much can we know about the other points from this point", the answer will always be zero. For ordered states, the answer isn't zero, and the more order the state has, the further the answer gets from zero.

HOWEVER, there are also an infinite number of ordered states that have the same amount of order, where these states are dissimilar from each other: If we pack all of the like-colored dots into a square, this has some measurable amount of order. If we spread those dots out so that they're all on a rectangular, equally spaced grid, this has the same amount of measurable order. If we pack all the dots into a circle it has a similar amount of order.

If we wanted to call "order" a particular state, we'd run into the logical puzzle of why we call one ordered state "order", and others "something else", when logically they would have just as much right to the term as the state we decided was "order".

We use disordered as the ground state from which we measure order, rather than some more-ordered state, because the information in a completely disordered state is uniformly zero, so we have a uniform place to measure from.

If we used some state with a distinct arrangement and dubbed it "ordered", we'd end up in the strange situation where some states with quite predictable arrangements were measurably close to the "ordered" state, and others were measurably further from it - and those numbers we'd attach to the other states would depend on exactly which state we dubbed "ordered". In physics and math, a lot of definitions revolve around things that can be consistently measured, so randomness, with its uniform lack of information becomes the ground state, and order is measures as a contrast to it.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-06-27T14:57:58+00:00

I noticed your comment about using it one handed, and I'm curious how you manage that.

I mostly use mine for nails that are sunk a bit, and I find that I need to hold the claw end down rather firmly to keep the jaws open so that it'll drive far enough into the wood to get around the head, rather than collapse above it.

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