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Please can anybody in Engineering help.
These lumps of red metal ( which make excellent paperweights) with push button and spring and probe / hook / spike that extends were left to me by a retired and now sadly dead ex colleague who came to own them in the same way. I believe they are ex aircraft industry as we worked in Vickers ( Used to be Vickers Supermarine) Can anybody identify them?
Hope you can help.
Andy
Those are weights for lofting rails (I am not sure that is the exact right term, my memory isn't what it used to be) Basically, the rail and weight set made up a very long flexible french curve. They were primarily in the aircraft and boat building ********** to allow full scale layouts of wing airfoil and boat hull profiles. These layouts were drawn on large sheets of velum laid on the floor of the design area. The flexible rails have a groove in their top edge and the points on the end of the weights insert into that groove to shape and hold the correct curvature of the rail. In pictures I have seen, there could be as many as 20 to 50 of these weights along the length of a rail.
Ah the good ole days of bedsheet full scale drawings! I can just smell the eraser dust and cigarette smoke in the air!