"In just 10 years, the number of chip mortisefordrillpress mills in the region has more than tripled--to at least 150--each devouring an average of 10,000 acres of forest a year," says Danna Smith, executive director of the Dogwood Alliance, a consortium of environmental groups opposing chip mill operations. And with each American using up 688 pounds of paper a year (the Chinese consume just three), chip mills are not only profiting, they''re expanding.

At the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum''s paleontology lab, the air scribe has become the workhorse of fossil preparation. The discovery of a large sauropod dinosaur in the highly indurated sandstones of the Mid-Cretaceous Turney Ranch Formation southeast of the museum posed numerous technical problems for our lab staff. Most troubling was the removal of vast amounts of sedimentary rock, which was both very tough and firmly cemented by silica to the softer, calcite-replaced bones. Experimenting with a number of hand tools, grinders, mortisefordrillpress hardware-store engravers, and rotary devices, we happened upon a Chicago Pneumatic Air Scribe (see supplier''s address on page 421), and it has since become our primary lab tool on this project. We now have five Chicago air scribes, and progress on our dinosaur has been extraordinary. One large and complex midback vertebra, which had been crushed during fossilization, took seven months to prepare with the scribe, but it was in the middle of a 150-pound block of sandstone. Not only was museum preparator Yolaikia Sciole able to remove this complex and fragile vertebra without damage, but ultimately it was prepared from the inside out, exposing most of the internal bone structures, including arterial and nerve canals and never-before-seen pneumatic structures that lightened the bone in life. Most of the bones in this vertebra are no more than 0.25-inch thick and are replaced mortisefordrillpress by easily cleaved, fragile calcite. The air scribe, and a light touch by the preparator, did the trick.

As the stay-at-home mom, I am drawn rapidly into Riley''s new interest. And after a brief initial hesitation, I plunge willingly and headlong into the world of the construction site. Riley''s excitement is infectious, and I find myself making detours so we can watch a forklift or excavator at work. In the car, he practically levitates out of his seat with joy when we pass a backhoe. "Mo''! Mo''!" he shouts. I try to explain that I can''t conjure earthmovers at will. But I suspect he thinks I''m being stingy. We buy a toy dump truck at a yard sale, and a relative in Illinois sends a nifty scale model of a John Deere tractor wheel loader.

©2003 www.drill-press.net All rights reserved.