When my kids lose something, even if they had it mere moments before, they frequently lament its loss as though it is just completely gone forever as opposed to clearly somewhere in their room, or the car, or whatever. And I always say to them, “Look again. It isn’t like there’s a small wandering black hole in our house sucking things into it.”
However, it turns out there IS one in my father’s workshop.
I was working on my little boxes, making the lids. I cut the Star of Davids (or should that be Stars of David?) out and was buffing the tops before moving on to the next step. The buffer is a cloth wheel that spins very quickly. We add buffing compound, which makes the process a dirty one as it makes the pewter nice and shiny, so my father has rigged up a fan to suck away the debris.
It ain’t pretty, but it works.
Because the wheel is spinning so quickly, it sometimes grabs whatever we are buffing and flings it away. It either hits the wall or, if it is smaller, it gets sucked away into the fan. It rattles down the tubing and, if we are unlucky, into a canvass dust-collector. If we stop the fan quickly enough, it will just be in the tube and easy enough to get out.
All the yuck ends up in here.
So there I was happily buffing a little lid when the buffer grabbed it out of my hand and flung it away. However, I didn’t hear a tell-tale ‘thunk’ of it hitting the wall or rattling of the tube, so I didn’t know where it ended up. I checked around the buffer. Nope. I undid the tubing at the joint where we normally find things. Nope. That left the canister itself. I unhooked the thing and dragged it out to the lawn.
Well, at least it isn’t very full.
A close-up:
I felt around inside. I got dirty(ier). I found nothing. No lid in the icky dust-collector. No lid on the floor. No lid in the tubes. No lid. Just gone. Therefore: black hole.
I made another one, and I buffed it all nice and shiny. See?
Becoming a Pewtersmith 