The Collaborative International Dictionary
Pritchel \Pritch"el\, n. A tool employed by blacksmiths for punching or enlarging the nail holes in a horseshoe.
Wiktionary
n. A metal punch or shaping tool with a round shank, designed to fit in a pritchel hole in an anvil
Wikipedia
A pritchel is a type of punch used in forging, particularly in making nail holes in horseshoes. The horseshoe is heated and a hole is punched through 90 percent of the steel with a forepunch or drift punch. The pointed end of the tool should be kept sharp and so that the burr is cut out smoothly. The punched hole is lined up over the pritchel hole and the pritchel is driven into the hole, knocking out the remaining metal at the bottom of the punched hole. The temperature of the pritchel should be always below the red-hot stage as the tool itself will bend and lose the temper. When over-heated it is advised to cool it in water intermediately.
Usage examples of "pritchel".
And when the sheriff and his deputy reached the scene, drove the twenty-odd miles into the remote back-country region where old Wesley Pritchel lived, Joel Flint himself met them at the door and asked them in.
But even after the marriage, old Pritchel still seemed to draw the line against his son-in-law.
According to rumour old Pritchel, who hardly ever went anywhere anyway, had never once entered the new house, so that he saw even this last remaining child only once a week.
This would be when she and her husband would drive each Sunday in the secondhand truck in which the son-in-law marketed the chickens, to take Sunday dinner with old Pritchel in the old house where Pritchel now did his own cooking and housework.
State University had dug into it until Old Man Pritchel got there, this time with a shotgun.
The old man was still locked in his room during the funeral, and even after they departed with the coffin for the churchyard, leaving in the house only the deputy in his tilted chair outside the locked door, and two neighbour women who remained to cook a hot meal for old Pritchel, finally prevailing on him to open the door long enough to take the tray from them.
And Old Man Pritchel not only denied having sent the wire, he violently and profanely repudiated any and all implication or suggestion that he even knew the policy existed at all.
Negro youth at the wheelstrange because Old Man Pritchel had never had a servant of any sort save his daughter.
Old Man Pritchel who must have been watching men make cold toddies for nearly seventy years and had been making and drinking them himself for at least fifty-three, would know this too.
Pritchel aint got any notion of selling even the clay to them, let alone the farm.
Uno's eye narrowed until it looked like the pritchel hole of an anvil.
But before we reached the door, Old Man Pritchel was already shouting for us to come inthe harsh, cracked old man's voice shouting at us from beyond the hall, beyond the door to the dining room where a tremendous old-fashioned telescope bag, strapped and bulging, sat on a chair and the three northerners in dusty khaki stood watching the door and Old Man Pritchel himself sat at the table.