Canon PowerShot G9
ƒ/2.8
7.4 mm
1/6
200
Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be?
The most specific answer within the next 24 hours wins the newest Jawbone Icon Bluetooth headset (with voice interface, in pearl white).
26 responses to “What’s That? (96)”
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Reminds me of an anchor peg which uses foam to secure the peg. The foam is injected into the e.g. wall through the pipe where it expands and sets, thereby anchoring the peg in place.
(yet knowing you, it is most likely the end of a ignition something for a rocket with some high power rocket fuel attached 🙂 )
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Tough one. It looks like an ordinary length of threaded rod that someone has invested a curious amount of effort in modifying- drilling out the center, splitting it, and either grinding off the thread on the other end or putting it in a metal sheath. The brown stuff looks like expanding foam. It seems to have got all over the threads when it was still wet and soft. Can’t tell anymore whether the rod is metal or plastic
At first I thought perhaps a used lacroscopic surgical tool, but this is far too crude and too big to be any surgical instrument I can imagine. I’d say this was made from common hardware store parts at home.My answer: Someone wanted a device that could be inserted into a hard-to-reach hole and be rendered irremovable- a hollow-wall fastener with a very specific application. It’s a drilled-out threaded rod, with one end split. Stick it in the hole, and squirt expanding foam through its length. The foam expands, bending apart the split end of the rod, never to be pulled out again (in theory, possibly disproven by this picture).
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I’m going with some kind of fastner with chemical adhesive. Not sure what you did wrong to make it go like that.
Either way, my answer is the same as the first two. -
It may resemble a fastener, but I’m going a different tack (no pun intended). I think it is a rod with rocket fuel at the end of it. Part of a solid rocket motor.
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first thought was the same as the rocketeer, knowing yer rocketry fetish is advancing like a moore’s law graph. then had an odd mental visual of cinderblocks (or the like) being tied together with these, and the expansion of the ends keeps things tied together…? kinda like some earthquake reinforcement strategy… now i am curious as to how they do reinforce things for earthquakes. didn’t your offices go through something like that last year?
…. maybe i ate too much pepperoni last night.
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I agree with "el Rocketeer" and "pegleg" based on the following… the sheen of the metal rod (even out-of-focus) resembles that of aerospace high tensile strength alloy. The residual adhesive foam is very similar to that of the "orangey" or rust-colored external propellant tank covering or skin (insulation). Ergo, me thinks this is one of rods involved in the Shuttle’s SRB support or "hold-down" posts sans frangible nut.
One thing is troubling me… how the epoxy solidified within the rod space that fractured from the (theorized) exploding nut. Unless this involves some type of melting with both the insulation foam/expoxy as well as the dampening sand in the nut capture bag – something tells me this is highly unlikely.
My last hypothesis is that this is a SRB support rod but it was not subject to a blast from the hold-down pyrotechnic initiator controllers (PICs).
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I want it to be a piece of genuinely tooth-breaking honeycomb (like the centre of a Crunchie bar) – so tough it bends tempered steel …
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I like Mariusm’s self-sealing stem bolt guess, but I think it’s a half-consumed Spongebob Squarepants sponge toffee lollipop.
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The "foam" is in fact a hard abrasive grinding compound mounted on a shaft. This tool rotated to grind something and was used over-enthusiastically so that the business end has broken apart. The destroyed left-over is what we are looking at.
The tool was used to grind the special high-precision bearings that need to operate in the vacuum and ambient temperatures found in space.
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Yes, it has been licked…. with many yummy aspirational guesses for this lollipop. Perhaps the first stumper in the puzzle series.
I think RRNeal was the closest, with an eye to the aerospace alloy, foam, and Shuttle post, as it comes from the same launch pad. He was also the one to notice that it has been fried by something otherworldly.
This was the very last Earthly object touched by the last Saturn V launch.
It is what remains of the wind direction sensor from the highest 380-foot level of the Launch Umbilical Tower (LUT-2) on Pad 39A , after a live passing of the Saturn V that brought to orbit America’s first space station.
After liftoff of AS-513 (Skylab-1), almost all of the foot-long "cup" area of the sensor was completely evaporated from its support structure as the plume of the rocket’s 7.6 million pounds of liftoff thrust brushed by during takeoff.
Here is the detail from the source:
“Your SL-1 wind sensor device was given to me in May 1973 right after the last Saturn V launch from a KSC worker-friend that lived across the street from me on Montego Bay Drive, Merritt Island, FL.His name was John D. Luca, an aerospace technician that was one of the workers assigned to the mobile launchers throughout the Apollo/Skylab era. John was employed by a number of different Apollo subcontractors at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center throughout his long aerospace career in Florida.
After the AS-513 launch of the Skylab Orbital Workshop Station on May 14, 1973, John was one of the primary post-launch and safety officials assigned to Complex 39. After each Apollo launch, and if his schedule required him to be on duty, he–along with 3 other workers–would return to the launch pad for a close-up inspection and evaluation of any possible damages done to the pad after liftoff.
In the case of SL-1, Steve, John was the first to reach the 380-foot level of the Launch Umbilical Tower (LUT-2) that had just launched Skylab into earth orbit about an hour earlier. While there, he detached the LUT’s wind directional/measurement sensor that was located at this high-top level. Once retrieved and disconnected from the tower, he kept the device as a souvenir and gave it to me about a week afterwards.
The full length of the supporting rod along with the actual wind "cup" device is nearly 2-foot-long. After liftoff of AS-513, just about all of the 1-foot-long "cup" area of the sensor was completely separated, or evaporated, from its support structure as the rocket’s 7.6 million pounds of liftoff thrust or plume brushed by during takeoff! The actual distance from the rocket to the wind device is just over 8.6 meters as AS-513 was completely "free" of the launch pad and umbilical tower as it passed by with such intense heat.
The "bent" portion of your support rod was not a result of the launch itself. It was how the support rod was constructed for this particular launch mission.”
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That was definitely a challenging puzzle! The bent portion of the rod seemed so clean as to discredit the original fracture theory – in addition to the supporting evidence of the epoxy’s location.
Here is the strange thing… having been born in central FL in 1970 and knowing I’d attended numerous launches at Kennedy as a very small child, I’d mentioned this puzzle to my mother back in my home state. She quickly replied, "you were there!’. So through some strange configuration of temporal confluence, the sensor and I meet once again.
Thanks, Steve – that was fun!
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It was meant to be.
P.S. benjiman pointed me to a cool high-frame rate video of the Apollo 11 launch to get a sense of what that Saturn V kicks out… and that led to a multi-angle video of the launch… and the Skylab 1 launch
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