Bugbear writes:
> I'm resurrecting an old thread here:
>
http://nika.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~cswingle/archive/get.phtml?message_i-
d=134579&submit_thread=1#message
>
> I was recently in the Lincoln Museum of Lincolnshire Life and they had
> a wotsit on display.
>
> They also had the answer.
>
> Here's what I saw:
> http://www.wdynamic.com/galoots/4images/details.php?image_id
>
> And here's a snapshot of the information sheet:
> http://www.wdynamic.com/galoots/4images/details.php?image_id
>
> So Jim Erdman's "experienced tool collector" was right on the nail.
>
> Is this a record for answering a post? (2 years!)
The picture shows a nice old iron artifact identified as a hand-driven
grinder for sharpening combs and cutters for shearing handpieces but
initially provided something of a puzzle until I re-read the label which
stated that "The mechanical shearing machine was hand-powered", which
furnished a further puzzle. Mechanically driven handpieces, at the
outset of their use in Australia as the replacement for blade shearing
and for many years afterwards, were necessarily driven from a powered
overhead shaft through a set of rods connected by universal joints.
Early in the piece portable steam engines furnished the power but were
supplanted by diesel engines and later still, where sufficient
electricity was available, by electric motors. In some sheds these days
each handpiece is powered by its own electric motor through a flexible
drive shaft. Whatever the power source, sufficient was always available
in the shearing sheds to power the comb grinders so that a hand-turned
grinder would have been a bit redundant.
Before the era of blade shearing came to an end here shearers had
organized themselves sufficiently well industrially to work at quite
remunerative piecework rates after the collapse of the Great Shearers'
Strike of 1891 had resulted in the formation of the Australian Labor
Party, as it was eventually named, through which workers achieved a
significant degree of political and industrial power. The driving of a
handset requires a significant amount of energy and it is barely
conceivable that a hand-powered mechanical shearing machine could have
furnished sufficient power to drive more than one handpiece. In other
words, it would have taken two men to shear a sheep in circumstances
where one good man with blades was well capable of shearing 200 sheep in
an 8 hour day, day after day. The blade-shearing record established by
Jackie Howe in 1892 stands at 321 sheep in 7 hours, 40 minutes (10
minutes off for each of 2 smokos per day). Strangely enough, this record
was not beaten by a mechanical hand piece until Mr Reick in 1950 shore
326 merinos.
All things considered, the hand-driven comb-grinder as part of a hand-
driven mechanical shearing set-up is a great illustration of a good
idea apparently somewhat before its time in terms of efficiency but
is a tribute to the ingenuity of the men responsible for bringing it
into being and it would be interesting to discover the date of
manufacture of the grinder and its concomitant shearing apparatus in
circumstances where, in Australia, blade shearing did not die out
until the early 1900s although mechanical shears commenced to be
adopted in the late 1800s.
The circumstance that the grinding surface of the old machine is in the
horizontal plane illustrates a train of thought that was not much
persevered with here. On the site below are advertisements for several
modern comb grinding machines, all of which have their grinding
surfaces in the vertical plane. There also is used these days a machine
similar to those illustrated but which does not have a central arbor
nut and to which sheets of abrasive are glued. The working life of the
fingers of the "expert" comb grinder is undoubtedly prolonged by the
absence of such nut.
http://www.austshear.com.au/html/grinders%20-
%20heiniger,%20sunbeam%20&%20lister.html
It is pleasing that such an old thread has been resurrected.
Regards from Brisbane,
John Manners
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