My parent’s neighbors a couple years ago got to keep the chicken’s from their son’s elementary school science project. They had a little area in the backyard fenced off for them. One day I noticed a lot of black feathers and no chickens. Apparently the chickens went to live on their friend’s farm.
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- Rich
Chainmail is a great solution!
Color coded too.
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Kewl! 
Those are super fun! Great idea. I can’t think of a better material for a game dice bag…the theme is fitting.
Nice! Did you use pre-made jump rings, or did you make them yourself?
I bought all of my rings from theringlord.com
The majority of the bag is actually the welded mesh they used to sell (they sold their equipment to another company that does it now)
Basically I built the bottom, connected it a sheet of the welded mesh and then stitched it up the side. Each one takes me about an hour
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Omg, this just totally solved a problem I needed to solve on a medical device I was making this week. This website is perfect. I needed 12mm-12mm solid copper or silver toggle clasps, and they have them!
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They’ve got fantastic customer service too!
They’re based in Canada which is a bonus for me (cross border shipping is a bit of a pain) but they’ve been geared towards selling to the US for quite a while
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Glad to know. That’s important when you are pushing boundaries of science! Thanks.
Oh, and the project is very cool. Never would have thought to use mail as a bag! The problem is that just gave me more ideas!
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Now I’m just curious what kind of magical medical procedures I just helped invent.
If it helps, they also sell niobium which I believe gets used in some MRI machines. Bonus, its also my second favorite metal!
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Good resource! I checked them out and they have an astonishing variety and pretty good prices. Bookmarked!
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Well it’s not for the squeamish but in case you wanted to know how docs practice colonoscopies and endoscopies (cameras through both ends of the GI tract) for procedures where we actually need to work on tissue (we have VR/Haptic trainers, too) you kind of have to work with an actual colon or stomach. So we use pig colons and stomachs (pig is actually a complicated choice for colons since they actually have a spiral colon and a counter-spiral small intestine, unlike ours which looks like a question mark). So you need a thing to hold said organs (when you don’t have a pig).
Now this turns out to be way more complicated than it sounds. So the 3D printed tray is “easy”, but the problem is 3D printed parts have ridges between the layers, so while the colon has been “cleaned” that means it only has billions of bacteria. So we clear coat epoxy the amphora to make it smooth and tough.
Next problem is while in a living patient (any species) we have circulating blood (read salt water) which happily conducts electricity from the cautery probe to the ground sticker (which we stick on your butt once you are knocked out). However a dead colon has no blood, so has very poor conductivity (plus it’s refrigerated making it less conductive too; currently what we do is have one of the junior fellows keep moving a clip lead as the person is working). So we had to come up with a scheme to conduct well along the entire length.
So I settled on a multi pronged approach of a continuous copper ribbon along each part (the rigs come apart into sections with neodymium magnets) and silicone insulated wire to little copper clips. Now why clips? Well we have to suspend the colon or stomach, taking the place of the mesentery (filmy tissue that holds your organs in place) with springs and clips. So each pure copper alligator clip has a brass split ring that has a spring on it. I then needed a large ring at the other end of the spring to go over the posts. I could not find good copper rings the right size until your post. Each of those clips also ties back into the ground plane giving us many points of grounding.
Now you ask, why copper? Well, because of the billions of bacteria. I am willing to use silver as well of course, but it’s a crappy metal otherwise and given the gorillas that will be using this, strong is better. Now the next problem is I have different kinds of metal, a moist/acidic (dead tissue is acidic) environment through which I am conducting electricity; “hey man, someone stole your battery!” (see 1980’s Eddie Murphy). So to prevent electrolysis I use sacrificial zincs like on a boat.
There is also a lung one in the works. All of these snap into a common case through a set of locator pins. I was cutting a case for it, when that happened…
Anyway, that’s the short version…
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I actually find this way more interesting than I thought I would. I’ve got an intestines story to share. Figured someone in the medical field would appreciate it.
My little brother (I use that term loosely, he’s 29, 6 foot 4 and built like a tank) actually had a bit of a medical emergency a few years ago. Doctors said it was a 1 in 10,000,000 thing. I guess his large intestine was free floating and not attached to his abdominal wall (or wherever it connects). I was told that usually this kind of thing gets caught within the first year of someone’s life. He lasted 28 years. He was out camping and started complaining about extreme pain in his stomach. He thought it was gas at first because he has had similar problems all his life. Hindsight it was probably always this issue. When he got to 10 out of 10 pain he had to get his girlfriend to drive another friend’s car a half hour so they could get cell signal enough to call 911.
Fast forward to the next day. Fathers day. My parents get a call on the house phone. Dad thinks it’s just my bro calling to say happy father’s day and that he would be out for supper. Nope. It was that he was going into surgery in a rural hospital an hour and a half drive away from us. His large intestine had twisted and part of it was dying. He ended up having to have a sizable chunk removed and spent 3 weeks in the hospital.
He’s fine now, but the doctors were mystified as to how that would go unnoticed for so long.
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Well, hardly 1:1000000. Actually I am designing a variant of this device (one of our surgeons complained, that in fact it couldn’t happen on my sim V1). We don’t see it very often, and when we do it is the sigmoid section of the colon, however it is a not uncommon (by that I mean 1:15000) complication actually of a colonoscopy itself. Now my wife, who is a veterinarian, sees these way more often. See our intestines actually hang from a stalk in the middle of the back wall of our abdomen. But because we stand upright, the intestines all smash down on top of each other preventing a lot of rotations. Animals on the other hand actually hang down and therefore their intestines can easily loop over themselves. When my wife was in vet school, she took care of a cow who had a torsed rumen (one of their stomachs) that had flipped over itself. It was on the “far side” from where they made their car-door sized incision. Being she was the junior student, they double gowned her and “sent her in” empire strikes back style. She describes the feeling of 500 pounds of intestines resting on your back, feeling pretty much how you might imagine it…
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So what you’re saying is I have a new and creative way to make fun of my brother? Gonna have to start calling him a cow 
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OMG, a real life taun_taun episode!
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Just made and installed my second counter today and microwave kitchen almost done (above for before pics)
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Originally:
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/bunghole
And then there is that very juvenile humor you were referencing that I remember from my late teens and 20’s. I missed that and Ren & Stimpy too!
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