Jeff Burks turned up an attention-grabbing patent for a camp stool that appears genius, and but I’ve by no means seen an instance within the wild.
Nathaniel Johnson of New York was granted patent 32,698 on July 2, 1861, for utilizing a curious metallic (or wood) orb because the centerpiece of a folding camp stool. In essence, Johnson requires utilizing an iron orb that’s pierced by three rods because the folding mechanism for the stool.
In and of itself, utilizing a sphere isn’t an enchancment. However what Johnson exhibits is that every of the three legs of the stool has a sympathetic spherical recess. This small element permits the legs to shut tighter with out considerably lowering the energy of the legs.
It’s a fairly sensible concept.
The problem, in fact, is in implementing it. I’ll grant {that a} machinist of common intelligence might create the orb with the three threaded posts. However creating the spherical recess within the legs could be a trick with off-the rack tooling. I don’t know of many drill bits which have a spherical slicing floor. Some router bits do. However then you definately’d should comply with that difficult operation by drilling a superbly positioned gap for the rod of the {hardware}.
I can visualize a drill bit that will reduce the outlet and sphere in a single go, however that bit doesn’t exist (so far as I do know).
So this one will get filed within the “cool, sometime” folder.
This has infected my lust to construct some extra marketing campaign stools from the leather-based and wooden scraps in my basement. And to dream of excellent spheres.
— Christopher Schwarz
