"Proctologically Violated©®" wrote in message
...
Awl--

An old friend, an old-school machinist who did most of his years in the
the
physics dept. machine shop of a big name U in NY, occasionally lowered
himself to do work for the biology dept.

He told me the other day he once made (and designed) a fixture for holding
**live goldfish**!!!
For this marine biologist, so's he could implant probes, chips, etc. into
these fish, and send them on their way.
wow.........

This came up as we were laughing about the angst caused by having to tap
holes as the *last* step of complicated parts. I had just broken a 1/4-20
tap in one of my follies (not even a blind hole, so there's not much of an
excuse, ceptin for bein an asshole), and was telling him about my compadre
who about once a month calls me up to complain about his workers, and
often
asks, rhetorically,
HTF do you break 3/8 AND 1/2 taps??? How do they DO it?????
I guess the same way they ruin 6" Kurt vises, by putting pipes on the
handles....

Inyway, my fish fixture friend broke a 2-56tap in his fishy creation,
hadda
stay all night re-making it.
Promised to show me his piece--proly will give it to me! We both collect
interesting machining examples.


Built a tool about 5 years ago ...

Running wire across spools, pulsed interruption of a magnetized wire with
laser, makes a "bar code" so to speak--end use was in marine research, for
the eventual implanting of tiny 'coded' wire segments into the baby fishes
noses--for tracking purposes...

Haven't fished for a while, ( figuratively speaking ) but I've heard that
oftentimes nowadays game wardens have some kinda 'wand'....reads that
code....

--

SVL