Best Tools I Ever Bought

[Mohawk]

Thanks!

 

[awac]

Haha! Nah it's just a curio! I eat me carrots, I'll be fine! I can't imagine it would have housed any Gamma emitters (the most dangerous kind) probably alpha or beta emitters, with short half lives. You've got me paranoid now!

Radium (Ra-226) or Promethium (Pm-147),n was used until the middle of the 90ties fur watch dials and avionics displays. Radium was (and still is) quite a fierce beta emitter with a half life of 12.3 years. But even full force on your wrist, you still only being irradiated with 1/100th of your yearly safe dose per year.

Although I'm always a bit suspicious of 'safe dose' when government officials say it.

Apparently those most at risk are people living in old stone built houses on top of inactive coal fields. Radioactive Radon gas is pretty awful stuff.

The instability of 222Rn, its most stable isotope, makes radon one of the rarest elements. Radon will be present on Earth for several billion more years despite its short half-life, because it is constantly being produced as a step in the decay chains of 238U and 232Th, both of which are abundant radioactive nuclides with half-lives of at least several billion years.

Radon gas is thought to be the #1 cause of lung cancer in the UK, owing to its abundance and prominence in previous coal mining areas, where it has been 'liberated' from safe rocks.

Still, not to worry. We'll all be burnt to a cinder in ten years time on account of El Trump and Musk's climate denial. Both of whom will likely be on a moon of Saturn by then, living it up in an inflatable megastructure till the last hurrah. B#stards every one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls

I agree with your thoughts on T&M btw!

 

[Canuk]

VAR #78 headset adjustment tool. Totally indispensable.

 

[bulgie]

This pneumatic, foot operated workshop stand. Pneumatic clamps for two bikes. I love it!

Careful with the air pressure.

A bike shop I worked at, Bud's in Claremont California (parent company of Santana tandems) had a couple, similar but not thesame brand. There was a pressure regulator knob that we used frquently, cranked up for big heavy bikes, down for lightweights.

One day in 1976 or '77 we got in what might have been the first 753 frame to come into that shop, a Raleigh IIRC. Bill McCready the owner wanted to be the one to unwrap and assemble, but he was out of practice, not being a day-to-day mechanic anymore, more a front-office type. He clamped the frame by the seat tube, and didn't think to check the air regulator setting before he did so. Squished it hard enough that it left permanent ridges where the sides of the clamp pushed the steel outward. No amount of persuasion with a mandrel down inside could make those ridges go away, so the frame was sold at a steep discount, rideable but rather embarrassing.

I don't think anyone there at the time said anything. I think a snicker would have been a firing offense.