SearchResearch Challenge (8/27/19): What are these three things?

Posted by Adi

On 11:48 04:41

After the immensity of last week's Challenge...

... let's do something fun (but challenging in a good way).

During the past week, three questions came up for me, each of which I needed to do a bit of SRS sleuthing to figure them out.

Can you do these along with me?

1. I've got a BIG (4 meters tall!) trellis of green beans growing in my garden. On Monday, I found this growing on stalks. Do I need to worry about them? Will they eat up all my beans? What should I do?

So... what IS this creature?

Here it is on my thumb for scale:

And a fairly in-focus closeup. The colors are even more striking in real life!

2. This is a diagram of an important part of a 3-hole punch that's currently broken. It's an aluminum metal pin with a collar-like-thing around the middle. That's the part that is missing, so the pin keeps slipping out onto the floor when I use it. I want to buy a new one… but... What do I call this? How can I find this online?

I tried to get a good picture of this part, but could never get a good enough photo to use. Here's my sketch.

The pin is about 1 inch long (2.5 cm) and the "collar" clearly snaps into a groove around the center. (It's also a bit more circular than my sketch, but you get the idea.)

What IS this gizmo? How do you search for something like this?

3. I just got a new piano. Hurrah! I’ve been waiting for this my whole life. But the place where it will sit in the house is fairly sunny. What should I use to cover it to protect from sun damage? What material should it be made of? (Keep in mind that this instrument has a new finish.)