I apologize for the last couple of post being late. My main computer died. Hard. I got the new blue screen of death with the frowny face. The computer tech had to wipe the computer and re-install windows.
Decades of work has to be re-installed. I did not lose much except playlists for music and the bookmarks in the browser. The computer died in the middle of a back up. I keep several back ups. It just takes time to re-install all the programs. Thank goodness I had a recent copy of the password vault data base.
How did someone in the Steampunk era solve problems. You may joke that they hit it with a hammer.
Having done some blacksmithing it’s not that easy. There are many different type of hammers. Some with very special uses that an ordinary straight peen hammer will not do well. Think of trying to make a shoe with a sledge hammer.
Also a blacksmith does not hit the metal he is working on as hard as he can. What he is trying to do determines how hard he has to hit the work. If you hit it too hard you can undo a weld you are trying to make, destroy a bend you are making in a piece.
Before a blacksmith hits the work he heats the work to the right temperature. It looks so easy, but the old style black smith shop had a shade roof with sides where the boards had gaps between them. The boards provided shade while the gaps let air in to cool the the smith, and the door was on the shady side of the building and was always left open. That is why I never believed in a dwarf smith working in a cave. It would get so hot he couldn’t work and the coal smoke would choke him. The same goes for an elven smith working out in an open glade.
Besides the fire hazard with the sparks the elven smith needs the shade to see the slight changes in the temperature as shown by the change in color of the metal. Red hot glow for bending wrought iron, straw yellow for working a steel sword blade, white hot for forge welding. The straw yellow is the hardest one. There are a thousand shades of straw yellow, but only one shade will work best for that piece of metal.
That’s why a blacksmith never worried about a farmer watching him work. He knew that the farmer would go back to his farm and take the biggest hammer he had and beat the piece he was trying to fix as hard as he could and turn the piece into a managed mess that the blacksmith would have to repair for a higher price.
But every now and then I want to treat this computer like an Orc and take my biggest hammer and beat the living c@#! out of it.
Stay strong, write on, and hammer it. Professor Hyram Voltage