(Roughly) Daily

This beast is called a “gabion machine,” which seems to be a slight misnomer.  A “gabion” is a cage filled with sand or stone used in civil or military engineering, e.g. for erosion control. What this machine is actually making, of course, is wire mesh of the type used to make gabions, which a lot of people call “chicken wire.” Twisting all those strands at once requires a lot of power-check out the size of the crank…

Via Boing Boing, by way of  Make

* The Blues Brothers

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As we get wired, we might send material birthday greetings to Waldo Lonsbury Semon; he was born on this date in 1898.  A chemist who had worked on improving rubber, he finally created a replacement: he discovered how to convert polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from a hard, unworkable substance to a pliable one– creating vinyl, the second most widely used plastic in the world.

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