On Tue, 10 Jun 1997, Lawrie Silverberg wrote:

 > Hi All,
 > ...
 > ...   When not at home with my wife and the dogs,  I'm
 > probably in my dental office telling people that I won't hurt them. 
 >   I have only been woodworking for  about 1 1/2  years  and  don't
 > specialize in anything specific at this time.  

Hi, Lawrie.  Welcome to a great bunch of galoots. :-)

I think you may be the first dentist on the list.  Well, you see, I've got
this chip over here outta this bicuspid, and ... oops, sorry, forgot my
manners there for a moment. :-)

Say, seriously though, I do have a question, in light of your profession. 
Doing some reading up last year on files and rasps, I came across some
really good info in a technical paper that went into the technical aspects
of the cutting-tooth geometry of files and their various cutting
characteristics, and really got down into the nitty-gritty of it all.  It
was a really, really good paper.  (But I don't remember the source,
though; it's been a while.) 

But about halfway through reading it and being fascinated by the info it
offered about files and how they work and the different types of tooth
shapes and how that effects their cutting, I was startled to find out that
the paper had been written not by some technos in a school or in a file
factory R&D department somewhere, but by a couple of dentists!  After a
second or two of being surprised and wondering what on earth dentists have
to do with files, I then remembered that they're quite the common and
important dentistry tool.  (It was obvious, after all, only I hadn't ever
really thought about that before.) 

So anyway, I don't know where I'm going with all this rambling, but I
thought of that connection between files and dentists when I read where
you said you "don't specialize in anything specific at this time" [meaning
woodworking], and I thought, well, yes, maybe you could tell us all sorts
of things about files we hadn't known?

Am I being silly, or is it really something folks in dentistry do get
into in that much detail?

In any case, now that I've made a fool of myself in front of everybody
(nothing new there) being so pesky, again, welcome to the group.  The
guys here really are amazing and good folks.

-- Steve