However, the first expression has its root in the wooden ocean ships of the past. Where the longest seam of a wooden ship, which ran from the bow to the stern called the “devil” and this had to be kept watertight. No captain wanted to have the ship sink and join the school of fish below. The “devil” had to be sealed time to time with black tar. This unpleasant job was done by having the seaman suspended from bosun’s chair. This chair is nothing more but a rope and a plank.Sitting on it was very precarious, especially when the ship was on high sea rolling and bouncing up and down like a runaway basketball.

Now back to our sailor and see what else he have done? I can reassure you he didn’t polish the deck with our dual speed machine. Nor did he clean the baseboard. But what else did he do? The sailor to distract himself from this unpleasant job could do nothing more then “Chewing the Fat” a saying used by seafaring men in the 19th century when salted beef was the staple diet aboard ship.

This tough cured beef was good for long voyages when nothing else would keep (remember there was no refrigeration) but needed long chewing time to make it edible. Men often chewed one chunk for hours, hence it was referred to as “chewing the fat.” If our janitor would have done the same thing, the floor would have dried and the janitor no longer would have been between the Devil and the deep blue sea.

]]> http://centaurmachines.com/uncategorized/between-the-devil-and-the-deep-blue-sea/feed/ 39 http://centaurmachines.com/blog/is-redwind-dangerous-to-your-health/ http://centaurmachines.com/blog/is-redwind-dangerous-to-your-health/#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:34:29 +0000 admin http://centaurmachines.com/?p=2565 Not if you keep it in the cellar and lock the door on it.But if, on the way home from the liquor store, you stumble and break the bottle in the foyer and spill it on your brand new 60 million worth of new Condo marble floor, then you might as well head for the Guillotine.

What to do? How to remove stain from the marble? That is where I come in. No, I am not offering our service to do the job, but I can give you a free sound advise as to what to do. Listen, it cost you nothing, not yet, the bill will come later and you better to mortgage the car.

One can remove wine stain in two ways:
1. The cheap & easy way. POULTICE treatment, which is as old as mankind. It has been used for millennia and still used today as medication. Mixing water with herbs and put it on the skin to cure blemish or wound. In case of the wine stain on marble, you’ll mix talcum powder and water. Smear or trowel it on the marble about ½” thick. Make sure that you cover the entire stain. Don’t get fancy with it. Then cover the entire stain with plastic such as garbage bag to protect the water from evaporation. Tape the edges of the plastic with masking tape on to the marble. Use tape that is used on walls during panting. Don’t use fancy duct tape or heavy-duty tape. You don’t want to replace the wine stain with an ugly left over glue stain from the tape. The beige or green masking tape will do just fine. Now comes the hard part. If you spilled the wine over a less walked section, then you are able to continue the work, because you must leave this Christmas package on the floor for two days. After which you pick up the whole thing, plastic, tape, and powder and throw it in the garbage. With luck the wine will miraculously migrate into the talcum powder. End of story

2. The expensive way. (Are you ready to mortgage your spouse?) If on the other hand you have spilled the wine right front of the elevator or the entrance door, which constantly in use, then the solution is to use diamond discs to re-grind, hone and polish the floor. Often times this is a long process. To do this job, you need to call an expert and the building management to have the job approved. You can also call me. We don’t do such work but I am teaching the method and able make references for companies who does it. We also rent such machines & sell the diamond discs. However, you still need someone who knows how to do the job.

A short history about “Jack the Ripper”

The name was given to an unidentified serial killer in London around in 1888 and why he didn’t have a vacuum cleaner?
For one thing he wasn’t in the mood of cleaning anything. He loved killing people.
- Jack the Ripper was an active society member in 1888 and he was using cutting-edge-technology, which wasn’t vacuum cleaner, but his knife.
- Most households didn’t have electricity until 1920, which didn’t bother, Jack the least. He liked the dark allays.
- In 1876 Melville Bissell invented the carpet broom the mechanical vacuum cleaner. This made household cleaning much easier and better. It was one of the first machines to help to liberate women from some of their work at home. However, he never informed Jack about it.
-  Women in that time (middle class woman) spent 3 days a week to wash the household linen and at least one day to clean the house before the vacuum cleaner arrived. Jack was interested in woman but not in the vacuum cleaner.
- Woman washed their hair once a month with soap, not with shampoo, which wasn’t invented until mid 1900. This soap made most women’s hair brittle, dry and sometime hard to comb. In general, it was a nightmare to use. Jack used blood instead. But he was still not interested in vacuum cleaner.
- Jack wasn’t the only killer in the 1800’s, wallpaper was another one. Wallpapers were saturated with ARSENIC and LEAD. Both of these were used for colouring the paper. It is believed that Napoleon’s death may have been caused by arsenic, since his hair sample contained about 100 times more arsenic than today accepted level. Wallpaper in the humid condition on the Saint Helena Island may have grown mould and emitted the highly poisonous gas arsine. But at that time Jack was ignorant about it.
- At the end Jack the Ripper died without a vacuum cleaner, which was an excellent tool, but not for killing.

Red matchplate

This match-plate for the floor machines more precisely for the Rabbit-3 is almost 50 years old. It is one of the tool we no longer use.

Some of these tools are made from wood while others are made from aluminum. Originally it was used to make parts with sand casting method for the predecessor of the Rabbit-3 floor polisher.

Now, in its old age has been put away to one of the dusty Centaur warehouse shelf, yet it could become a great wall decoration in an office or somebodies home. That is if you like rustic appearance.
Although as of today the Rabbit-3 floor machine still our best seller but we use a different method to make them.
The story doesn’t stop here. I created Centaur Floor Machine on the strength of these tools. We became Canada’s most respected & innovative floor machine maker. Many of our floor machines produced from these plates after 45 years are still in use to clean offices and hospitals around the country.
I tell you more about these plates.
When these tools were made in the early 60’s one could buy a Volkswagen (the original one) for the price we paid for them. By the way, at one point we had a run-in with the Volkswagen people. Their lawyers sent us a letter telling that we can’t use the name “Rabbit” or “Rabbit-3” on our machines. Obviously they din not know that unless THEY manufacture floor machines and named it “Rabbit”, they can’t stop us using the name. That settled the matter.
Unfortunately, after tools were paid, we couldn’t afford a good foundry to make the actual aluminum pieces. Our solution was to give it to a one-man operation hole-in-the-wall foundry. His name was Han. His fame derived from the fact that he survived the 1941 winter battle at Moscow Russia at minus 35 and 40 degrees because the cold weather didn’t bother him. (Although it bothered Hitler a great deal after he lost the battle partially because he didn’t issue winter clothing to his troops and many froze to death) Needless to say that Han had no heat or lighting in his foundry. He didn’t even wear shirt during the winter (in Toronto 1963) while working around the furnace.
But he was a good foundry man and he made our first thousand floor machine parts for us.
If you have a floor polisher with the date marked on the handle “60″ then you have the machine made from these early times.

Show this to your friends, children and/or grandchildren!

Around the turn of the century in 1900

What did we do at the turn of the century in 1900?
1. We didn’t worry about old age pension because the average life expectancy was 45 years.
2. We didn’t clean floors as we do today because the electric floor machines and electric vacuum cleaner weren’t invented yet.
3. Nevertheless, floor polishing was done in an interesting way. The mothers or the maid scrubbed the floor on their knees with a hand brush. After which the floor was rubbed with paste wax. Then the kids were fitted with a “shoe brush” which is a short bristle brush and it was strapped to the shoe. Then the kid was told to dance, which meant to shuffle and shine up the floor. If there were a boy and a girl then they were paired to dance. The one who whistled better supplied the music. This kind of floor polishing could be done in less than an hour if the room was small.
4. Then rugs were put in place and unless you were willing to risk your life, you didn’t step off them.
5. Marble and granite floors were treated similarly accept they weren’t waxed.
6. The gasoline for this car was sold in drug stores over the counter so was marijuana, heroin, and morphine. Sorry, I almost forgot, so was cocaine.
7. Communication in short distance was simple, you howler. For long distance they were using the then existing Internet the Telegraph. While hollering cost nothing, for the Telegraph you paid every word you sent. More often than not you had to walk down to the Telegraph office to place the order. Of course you could use the telephone instead, but did the operator understood clearly what you said? If not, you paid for the wrong message.
8. Cleaning carpet or cleaning rug was simple. You hang it up outside to on the fence and beat the living daylight out of it.
9. Left over tealeaf’s sprinkled on to the carpet helped to gather dust
10. To make it shiny you brush salt in to it.
11. Cleaning marble or polishing granite floor was even simpler. Wash it with water.
12. The cost of a semi-detached house in Toronto cost less than $2,500
13. Most women washed their hair only once a month with Borax. Shampoo wasn’t invented yet.
14. If your marble floor had an ugly spot on it, you would use talcum powder mixed with water or turpentine and create a poultice. Heap it up on top of the stain, cover it well and leave it there for two days. With some luck the stain were transferred to the talcum powder.
15. Marble floor polishing was done by hand unless you were rich and able to afford a steam engine driven polishing machine weighing two tons without the polishing stones.
16. Diamonds were used only to decorate woman’s attire not for polishing stones.
17. Rejuvenate marble or terrazzo floors were not in the dictionary.
18. Restoration courses for marble didn’t become the reality for another 100 years. To polish terrazzo you had to be a stonemason.
19. Our Rabbit-3 floor machine was not even on the drawing board for another 95 years.
20. Ninety percent of Doctors had NO college education! And some doctors still refused to wash their hands before baby delivery or surgery.

If Dr. J.Lister or Dr.Semmelweis would have seen it, they would have turned in their graves.
Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis introduced hand disinfection standards in obstetrical clinics,in 1847
Dr. J. Lister became the first person to perform an antiseptic surgery in 1865

In contrast, today we even disinfect marble floors and granite floors if the need arise.

Let’s pretend that we are back in the mid 1800′s when people around the Mississippi river, believed in most everything they were told as long as it was packaged well. Here is my package.

This is how Huckleberry Fin would have answered this question. (Remember Mark Twain the author)

Listen, said Huckleberry to his friend Tom, if you really want to know the secret as to how I do marble polishing with vinegar then do this. Go to the graveyard with a vacuum cleaner filled with vinegar and a dead cat in hand at midnight when the moon is full. Put the vacuum cleaner on a yesterday’s grave and open it’s lid then dunk the cat in it. Make sure it gets wet all over. Now wait for the devil to come. You can’t see him only hear something like the wind when it takes the corps away. Then say loud; ‘devil follow corps, cat follow vinegar.” Close your eyes and walk backwards 5 steps and says aloud, Mary, Joseph, Paul come to help me, say it 5 times. Then swirl around 3 times to your left while keeping the dead can steady in your hand. Pluck one hair out of the cat and put it on the grave. Now pick up the vacuum cleaner and take it home (don’t forget the cat) just as sun break through the clouds, drag the cat across the marble floor and the marble is restored and will be shiny as the midnight moon.”

Caution, if the devil doesn’t like your finished floor which turn out to be messy, then come to my marble training seminar and learn how to do it right.
Motto:
Oldwife’s tale doesn’t die, just go to sleep.