(re-post)
Twenty silver balls. Ten cents apiece at the weekly church thrift shop (in two baggies, $1.00 each bag). Treasures.
They have substance and shine and rollability that is most satisfying for some reason.
They bring back memories of marble games where such a sphere was prized and rare and was kept safely in the Seagram's purple bag with gold trim if you felt at all unsure about your skill being far greater than your opponent. I cannot now recall what name we gave them. ???
I thought they were ball bearings but good ol' google came up with this and so I am now better informed. Ball (bearing). Ball of the bearing sort. And since there are twenty of them they are bearing balls.
The reason I sat down with my know-it-all friend and inquired ??ball bearings?? is because I wanted to know what they are made of because one was rusty (the large one on the left) and I took an SOS pad vigorously to it and it didn't become shiny but sort of nicely mottled. Actually I still don't know what they are made from. As is usual with the KIA friend - the amount of information is ' more than I really wanted to know' - not because I do not find it interesting - it is just far too much detail to read through if I want to get the laundry done and supper started and this blog posted and ….. oh, you know.
But I am impressed by the skip-and-doodle browse I did do and what I learned. A lot - a really lot! – of things went into the making of each and every one of those bearing balls. It involved different gradients and a specially designed machine and geometric tolerance and surface integrity and size and sphericity. All this is not so kids will have something marvelous for marbles: it has to do with the ball bearings into which the bearing balls go. Well, of course.
And I did scroll down further and found that bearing balls are commonly made from steel, brass, gold, copper, silver, plastic, glass …… Commonly. Makes me wonder what they are uncommonly made from otherwise why include that definitive adverb. I think mine are steel. Maybe stainless steel. Except for the one that rusted. How and why was it part of the bunch, I wonder. KIA friend is, sadly, not able to offer me this interesting information …… yet.
I'm not sure what I will do with them. Play marbles maybe. For the moment they are being admired.