With this month’s Guess What, we’ll try a slightly different approach – a change of pace, if you will. How about a game of location? It’s your mission to figure out WHERE it would more apt be used – after a brief description of what it does.

            It’s a vertical (or horizontal) triple post adjustable gravity vise clamp – with the gripping pressure increasing in proportion to the size of the item being worked on. It fits in your hand.

            Was it used by a pharmacist to cork a bottle, or a jeweler for repairing charm bracelets? How about an auto mechanic to restore a faulty windshield wiper arm? Or a carpenter mending a broken dowel? A seamstress might utilize it to repair a cantankerous zipper, a shoemaker to reinforce a deteriorating shoelace eyelet, the secretarial pool as a back up pencil sharpener vise when the electric one failed.

            Any locations we’ve left out? Maybe – the correct one. Push-over month – we’ll even give you that one: “the pool hall,” but you still have to figure its reason for existing. Revelation next month.

Till then!

July 2004
 Guess What?

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Answer to July 2004 'Guess What?'

            The object in last month’s GUESS WHAT is obsolete in today’s scheme of things – though it was extremely useful in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s – before agricultural geneticists and laboratory hybridizers went to work on the lowly grapefruit; in fact, they got to the “core” of the matter by eliminating the pesky pits – creating a citrus mutation.

            Before this, one needed a special corer to remove the center seed clump. This device accomplished it in two actions: 1) circling and zeroing in, isolating the seed mass 2) clamping it with the perforated nose cone – grasping and extracting, having drainage capabilities. This was used by hotels and restaurants for quantity preparation. Home use was simpler, but more laborious – by hand!*

* Available for acquisition