h a l f b a k e r y"Not baked goods, Professor; baked bads!" -- The Tick
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Most people who have spent significant time in industrial food handling situations will have noticed that metal forks have a nasty habit of getting their tines out of whack.
Some customers appear to get a sick pleasure out of using the lowly fork for origami, or knot-tying experiments. Apathetic
co-workers jam them in electrical sockets to put themselves out of their misery, garbage disposals apparently contain magical fork-specific magnets, and careless individuals get them stuck on all manner of things other than the food.
Some restaurants unscrupulously continue re-using these mangled metal mandibles, at extreme risk to the diner's oral safety. Others waste vital employee hours tending to the twisted tines. A few waste vital money replacing the ruined... runcipals... OK, that doesn't work, but you get my point.
Fear not, the Fork Fixer is here!
Grab a handful of the deformed forks, and feed them handle first into the fork fixer. Our patented tine-therapy fork re-forming mill will quickly, and efficiently return the tines to a proper spacing one from the other, and mold the finished product back into an aesthetically pleasing, curve which has been scientifically calculated for optimal food-harvesting purposes.
I have a drawer full of forks just like this
http://clipmarks.co...-9999-0E477B5E1C2C/
Glad someone's finally gonna straighten me out. [Amos Kito, Feb 08 2008]
Uri Geller
paper_2c_20scissors...20fillet_20steak_2e
[hippo, Feb 08 2008]
[link]
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Will this thing ten a door? |
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Amos, enjyou your virtual bun for the link. They may look like art to you, but that's not too far from what forks generally look like when they are finally returned to the restaurant dishwasher. |
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Uri Geller could do with one of these. |
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The machine should hone the tines to a needle-sharp point as well. |
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I think it'll be harder to engineer than
you imagine. If you have one tine out
of line, and if your machine just bends
it until it is back in line, then it will
spring back by a small amount. The
problem is the Hookeian limit of the
material. |
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So, you need to slightly over-bend the
tine so it springs back to the right
position. An alternative would be to
bend **all** the tines to the same
position (ie all over-straight or under-
straight), then bend all the tines
together back into position and a little
the other way. Then, they will all spring
back by the same amount and remain
perfectly in line. |
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Of course, if you do this more than a
few times, you'll fatigue the metal and it
will all go terribly wrong. |
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After all, you wouldn't want it to break up in mid-air... |
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The Tine Machine - little-known early
work by H.G. Wells. |
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Buns aside, you're pushing for a m-f-d magic here unless you can explain how the thing finds the tine (Oh, if I could only find the tine) that is out of shape in the first place. Bear in mind that I do not expect you to fix the [mosquito]'s forks (in the link), just the less artistically bent ones. |
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//I think it'll be harder to engineer than
you imagine.// nonsense! The device
merely needs to consist of a furnace and a
suitable set of moulds. Old cutlery in, new
cutlery out. |
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Assuming for a moment that the forks are all created equal (admittedly, they are not) The tine machine would take the forks handle first, as the handle is more or less correct for all. Sets of rollers attached to hydraulics would move the handle down into the machine. |
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When the tool-end of the fork hits the machine, the hydraulics would push the rollers away, and another pair of rollers with grooves in it would close down onto the fork. The tines would slide into the grooves near the base of the fork where most bending would not be sufficient to alter the working of the machine. This grooved pair of rollers would then do the major work of straightening the tines. Additional grooved rollers of varying sizes might be needed to handle different sized forks, or to provide additionl touch-up work to the points. |
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I just didn't want to ruin good ad-press with complicated explanations. |
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Name has been edited in honor of Unabubba and MaxwellBuchanan's years of service. |
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