Our rural neighborhood feed store no longer carries bone meal for fertilizer
due to the Psychobovine scare. I managed to snag his last small sack with
the understanding that it would be used only for my experiments with heat
treating metal. Bone meal is a traditional ingredient in "case hardening"
and "case coloring" metals such as hammers and triggers on black powder
guns. The metal parts are placed inside, for example, an iron pipe filled
with bone meal, heat soaked for a while and allowed to cool. The process
transfers carbon to the metal, which develops a thin, hard exterior over a
softer, tougher and shatter resistant interior, making for hammers that
resist peening but don't break. And the resultant rainbow colors are
magnificent.
Those of you wanting the ultimate in tricked out gear might consider custom
made, case hardened film advance levers, shutter release buttons and rewind
levers. For small pieces like the depth of field preview and lens mount
release levers, I'd recommend instead the method used on Luger safety
levers, which involves flame treating them to a lovely straw color.
Wonder what the market might be for such custom goodies, considering there
is a significant market for equivalent custom gun parts. Can you just
imagine an OM with case colored metal bits, custom leather, maybe even
gently sandblasted or bead-blasted titanium top and bottom plates...wow.
How 'bout a set of Morgan Sparks leather with custom hand grip built into
and underneath the leather, rather than that add-on plastic bit.
Mother-of-pearl inlaid "OLYMPUS" and model I.D.
Soft gold highly polished eyepiece trim, to resist scratching eyeglasses.
The mind boggles...
Lex
===
I haven't seen anything in the papers about people in the US with mad
cow disease, but I have read that feeding ground up, unmarketable
cows to other cows is common practice here. Since that seems to be
the practice that has created the situation in other countries, I
wonder whether it is either misdiagnosed or whether we are just in
denial.
Winsor Crosby
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