This picture I find intriguing due to its ambiguity. The situation is obviously technical, in a tar-paper shack sort of way, and the scatter of tools and glue spots all over the surrounding bench speak to some sort of productivity (By the way, I lived in a tar paper shack for a couple of years while learning guitarmaking, and I loved it). Getting back to the picture - It looks like something intentional is going on, but it isn’t clear just what that is. Curious!

There seem to be five principal elements in the activity– a hot air gun, a digital meat thermometer, a cardboard box with a hole in the top and one end open, what appears to be a fairly large piece of sandpaper lying on the box, and …. a cell phone?? Hmmm……

These shop hot air guns can blow very hot air. Most often they come in handy for removing old adhesive labels from UPS boxes so they can be re-used for shipping. But you can use them for more serious purposes, for example to set up a very inexpensive blow-molding operation. You can make a pretty good high-temperature oven in the form of a big box made out of that silver-sided insulation you can get at Home Depot held together with long nails or wire wrapping.  Crude works. Make holes for your hot air guns (you will probably need more than one), stick them in, turn them on, and when things get going you can cook a pizza in there.  More to the point, you can put a sheet of plastic in a frame, put it in the box, and pretty soon it gets all soft and rubbery, which you can then take out and put over a vacuum form to make a new sled or whatever needs to be done.

Trying to figure out this picture, it definitely looks like someone wanted to heat the air in the box while keeping a close eye on the temperature.  But what are they heating so carefully – the phone? If you look closely the phone seems to be working fine with the screen showing some typical text messaging.

This particular digital thermometer is very accurate, and is used during maple syrup season to keep track of the maple sap temperature as you boil it down. Ten gallons of maple sap boil down to a quart of maple syrup, which is a pretty straightforward process until you get toward the end, when the water is almost all boiled out.  Then things can get very dicey, particularly if you left the kitchen for a moment, thinking everything was under control until you got back.  All of a sudden the last remaining bit of water in the boiling syrup goes super-critical, and what looked a moment ago like some happily bubbling syrup has suddenly turned evil, becoming a malevolent bubbly brown mass foaming up in your cooking pot. Your last chance to avoid disaster is to get back to the kitchen just as this is happening and turn off the stove. Otherwise that foaming sugary mass will pretty quickly spill over the sides of the pot and head down for the burners. Then your smoke alarms get to join in the fun. The worst I have seen is to run back to the smoke-filled kitchen with everything a total mess of burned syrup all over the stove, and a glowing ember in the middle of the hardened charcoal foam in what used to be your cooking pot.

The trick with syrup is to turn it off when it reaches seven degrees above the local boiling point of water, which is just before it goes super-critical.  At low altitudes, this is 219ºF, and that is what this particular thermometer is very good for.

A straightforward deduction from looking at this picture is that someone wanted to heat up their phone in a careful manner – perhaps to dry it out after it fell in the toilet. Ok, that is plausible.  But then there is that big piece of sandpaper that looks like it was part of the operation.  Sandpaper??