Talk:Spindle (stationery)

Fiddlesticks!

"OSHA-compliant safety spindles, with the last 1/2 inch or so bent at a 90° angle to reduce the likelihood of injury, have been available for some time." I call bull on this - I could not find anything on OSHA's web site about this, or anything on Google. The closest thing I found was a Fellowes Wire Spindle, Black, on Staples.com, which featured a safety cap. The main reason I think this is suspious is that a paper spindle with a 90° bend would be near impossible to use. Unless someone has actually seen one of these "safety spindles", I think it would be safer to just to say that safety can be an issue, and you can use a plastic cap when the spindle isn't being used.

Transfinite 01:47, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

another kind of spindling

Spindling in the context of IBM-style puch cards may have a second meaning. I never, ever, saw a punch card stuck on a spike spindle, and I think such an action would be covered at least as well by the generic prohibition "multilate". Some commonly used card punch machines included, in a box above the keyboard, a cylinder around which a punch card could be wrapped. The cylinder rotated as the column being punched advanced. The punches in this wrapped card controlled some (sometimes automatic) formatting operations in the machine, setting tab stops, for instance. Once a card had been wrapped around this "spindle", as it was commonly called, the card aquired a more or less permanent circular distortion that would make it difficult to feed in a card reader, as would the crease from a fold. I certainly can not speak for IBM, but this spindle, which was in every manual card punch I ever used, was always what I thought they were talking about when they said "spindle", the one right in front of me. I think the existence of this kind of spindle should at least be acknowledged. --AJim (talk) 19:07, 8 June 2015 (UTC)