On 26/01/2006 10:17 PM, Oleg Lego wrote:
The John entity posted thusly:

# 572 I had one of those back in the fifties when I was a little
kid. It was a wire cutter but I used it for cutting anything i could
get in the blades. It worked good for trimming the apple tree we had in
the back yard, but it was really ment for stripping and cutting wire.
It had a lot of leverage since the cutting hole was close to the pivot.

You _thought_ it was a wire cutter, but...

http://miningartifacts.homestead.com...tingitems.html

Last picture at bottom of page.

Now that I look at it again, it's something I remember from my long-ago
youth. We lived in a mining town and my Dad worked summers in the mine
(he was a teacher the rest of the year). He carried one very much like
that. That job used to scare the crap out of me when I was kid; every
couple of years some miner would kill himself from a blasting cap
explosion. They had the habit of carrying them in their shirt pockets.
He was more careful than that, but I always used to worry that he
wouldn't come home one day.