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To: Gauguin who wrote (51721)	6/3/2000 10:50:00 AM
From: Crocodile	Respond to of 71178

Three cheers for Norton is right... great score... I was thinking about the drill head some more this morning... Thinking about how it reminds me of a Roman bust... A general, or a senator... Silent, distinguished... Only maybe it's an "internal bust" and not an "external one"... Maybe seeing what's "inside" of a Roman general's mind.. Or maybe an architect's, or an engineer.... A Trajan, a Hadrian, or maybe a Vitruvian mind... But then I was thinking of what you said the other day... About how it looked like some weird, exotic hair-do (You did mention that, didn't you??) That the drill heads look like weird coils of hair...or corn rows....Ethiopian, Babylonian... hmmm..... Hope the chain turns out to be the kind you're thinking of... Used to be something pretty interesting up on the Ottawa River. The paper mills in Ottawa used to bring pulp logs downriver from the forests of the upper Ottawa Valley using big log booms towed by tug boats... They were just huge... like a giant corral filled with logs... with a big, old tugboat chugging along taking the boom downriver... When it was in front of our cottage, it looked like a big flat island of tawny coloured "land".... A couple of times, the tugboat left the boom staked out at a point of land just down from us. I'm not sure why they did it... maybe the tugboat broke down or maybe the river got too rough to make headway... Only happened a couple of times over 15 or so years... On both occasions, I went down with my dory and tied to the boom to take a look around. The booms are made of giant "links"... which consist of a massive wooden section, then great steel links at each end to join it to the next wooden section, and so on ... I think each wooden section of would be about 20 or so feet long... made of big squared timbers... sort of a flat raft-like platform, but with a timber on top and another on the bottom... in effect, a massively heavy raft with a "keel" on the bottom and top so that the wooden link would be stable and wouldn't start rolling over as the boom is towed along behind... Each of these wooden links is quite thick, so that logs can't push up or down to escape from the boom... I walked all around the boom and jumped from wooden link to link... It was very stable...barely noticed that I was on it.. It took hours for the tugboat to go downriver to Ottawa. It would often take about half an hour for it to go past our cottage...from when it appeared upriver, to when it disappeared around the point of land just down river... a distance of about a mile in total I guess... so I doubt it was making better speed than 2-3 miles and hour... but that really depended a lot on the weather... But, the captain wasn't in a big hurry... You could see him sitting at the wheel as there were quite a few windows in the cabin... Probably had a pretty good view of the Gatineau Hills and both shorelines from there... On the way back upriver, the tugboat could cut a pretty good wake... Funny to see how fast it could go when it the boom was undone and stretched out in a long "line" behind.. When it was at its full length, the boom was really long... have no idea quite how long, but those booms were huge... Something that was always kind of fun, but not too common a sight, was when the log men would come down river a couple of times a year to haul escaped logs off the beaches or out of shallow water to clean up the shore line and take these logs ahead down river.... They used big grey wooden dories and stood up most of the time as they went by. They had long wooden poles with hooks on one end that were used to pole the dories in around the rocky shorelines and then to use as pry-bars to dislodge logs that had gotten piled up or snagged on docks or other obstacles. The log men were quick on their feet..... ran back and forth from end to end in the dories... over the flat wooden seats... poling the boats and stabbing at logs... These would be the same men that worked the log chutes coming down from the mountains upriver... or that filled the booms... used to walking across logs in booms to break up log jams... very risky, dangerous work, but they made it look easy... like a dance.... All of this was a part of the history of this area... It still goes on to this day, but it's a lot different now... Kind of neat to have had a chance to see how it used to be done.

To: Gauguin who wrote (51721)	6/3/2000 12:00:00 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

That looks like one of the drill bits that Howard Hughes' father designed for oil drilling. What I recall is that the three heads could be replaced when they wore out, so that made them economical to use, as well as more efficient. But Hughes, Sr., never sold the drill bits, he rented them, and that's how he got rich.