What Is It? Game 137

W00t! It's time for this week's collaboration with the What Is It? Blog. Do you know what the strange screw shown above is used for?

Place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you can think of. Write no URL or web links in the comment - doing so will invalidate your entry. The first correct guess and the funniest albeit wrong guess will win T-Shirts of their choice from the NeatoShop. You've got until the right answer is revealed at the What Is It? Blog sometime tomorrow.

IMPORTANT: Be sure to write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't, then we'll send you a random T-shirt if you win. Visit the NeatoShop and take a look around. We've got a lot of neat Science T-shirts and Funny T-Shirts.

For more clues, check out the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!

Update 5/10/10 - the answer is: A stage screw, used to anchor stage braces to the floor, as seen in patent number 648,531. According to patent number 820,655, they could also be inserted into "walls, or upper structure to provide a fixed pint of attachment, so that cables, hooks, guy-ropes, etc, may be readily engaged with ring portions, and thus fastened to the handle, or the device may be used in connection with the various stage-settings and scenery-frames as a fastening means or coupling member."

Congratulations to Heath Hays who got it right first and to philosophile for "Mickey Mouse's Home Brain Surgery Kit."

This is a Canadian Maple tree tapper! You stick it into the side of a maple tree, screw it in and out, and once you pull it out, the maple sap runs out the hole..

Mmmm, yummy...

BUSTED! Large :D
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The scale of this item is what I would need to be accurate, but it could be an object to manually cut the hole in a barrel for the cork to fit through.

Thesaurus - Ash Grey - Small, please :)
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It is a stage screw used to affix scenery to the stage. I used them in high school 20 years ago, but haven't seen them since. It isn't destructive as one poster suggests -- stage floors are self-healing.
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It is a screw that was screwed into a stage floor and then support poles which had hooks on the ends would be attached to the back of stage flats and the other end would hook into the round part of the screw. Thus making the scenery stable.
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Its a stage screw. It is screwed into the deck. Then a stage brace hooks into the screw, and attached to a flat of the set. They arent used much any more, but the theatre I work at still has a bunch of old stage technology like this sitting around
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It's a stage-screw used for old school set construction along with stage-braces. I have 3 of them in my shop and I really only use them to show tech-students how things used to be done.

Score points for the theatre-nerds.
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Properly called a "nipple extractor" and used to extract screws, bolts, valve seats and all other manner of threaded fasteners, hardware and plumbing parts.

The $700 Billion Shirt, medium
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