Quite a few years ago I was standing and visiting at the counter in a lumber yard office when a person came in and up to the counter and said, “I need a board.” I could almost see the service manager struggling to not roll his eyes. Since the potential customer didn’t seem to be familiar with lumber language, I’m pretty sure he was anticipating the extended dialog that would be necessary to figure out what they needed.
For some reason that scene has stuck in my mind and reminds me to try to learn the customary names for the objects I encounter. Last week I was stumped in my effort to settle on the name for the Item I’ve attempted to roughly illustrate here.
I did a Google image search for some terms I thought might give me what I had in mind. I tried, Rod Lock, Stop, Catch, Detent, Keeper, Tab, Key, Ear and a few others with no luck. After that failure I drew a sketch and decided to ask anyone I encountered what they called this mechanical structure. Every person I questioned immediately recognized it but couldn’t come up with a name. Finally, and engineer called it a shaft tab lock. I went back and did a search for that and still had no luck.
Finally, by searching “hydraulic door closer”, which I knew used that mechanical technology on some models, I found the image here. http://www.allaboutdoors.com/article_info.php?articles_id=141
The article described them as lugs. In my own terminology I had always called them ear tabs since they stick out like ears. I’m now thinking they are properly called lugs but the term isn’t widely known. In my mind I’m going to call them ear tab lugs.
This reminds me of an old Dave Barry column you liked years ago when you first came across him -- "How to Make a Board":
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