Engine Show

[JimCt]

This past weekend we had our local engine show here in town.  Amazing what some of the boys have squirreled away in their barns...










Cut-away demo Pratt & Whitney radial engine which powered Navy Corsairs of Black Sheep fame...









Big old make & break just ticking over...


Belt driven shingle mill turning out product:



Nice fresh-cut shingles:


These restoration projects really aren't all that much different than ours.

[John Jones]

Nice Jim.  Don't tick off whoever uses the monster chainsaw in pic 4.

You would love to see the stuff at the last place I worked in Alabama.  The most impressive is a 1907 vintage Ingersoll-Rand steam driven gas compresser.  Four cyliniders, horizontally opposed.  Variable displacement steam cylinders on one end, gas cylinders on the other end.  Flywheel about 14' in diameter.  Mechanical oilers external to the engine.  Max reccomended RPM was 120 in 1907, we limited it to 100.  It is still in use today.

[LilRichard]

JJ- may be a dumb question, but what was that used for?

[John Jones]

It was a coke and coal chemical plant.  We cooked coal in ovens, just like making charcoal with wood.  The end product, coke, is 99+% carbon and is used in iron foundries and blast furnaces.  The gases driven off in this process have a high BTU value, about half of the value of natural gas.  The compressor pumped the by-product gas to our boilers to make steam which is used in other processes around the plant as well as generating electricity.  The plant has been in continous production since 1920.  It's been owned by Walter Industries of Tampa for quite a few years.

http://www.sloss.com/coke/

[JimCt]

Life of an engine is tied in with it's RPM's.  120 RPM will live forever.  The engines in the show were used mostly for driving line shafts in factories, pumping water, sawing wood, washing clothes (Maytag made their own engines), shelling & grinding corn and on & on.  Almost all of the engines delivered their power through flat belts which were driven off the flywheel.  Belting manufacturing was big business.  Lubrication was delivered by external drip oilers like the one you see on the green engine in the seventh picture.  

We didn't have any operating steam engines like JJ's at the show this year although in the past we've had steam launches show up.

[John Jones]

Our machine shop still had all the shafts and pulleys in the ceiling of the building for driving all of the machine tools from one engine.  They have been long since converted to individual electric motors.

[LilRichard]

That's really cool JJ.  I know a guy over at Walter in the PR department... apparantly they were approached by "Dirty Jobs" to do a show at that Coke plant.

[John Jones]

You would not believe...  

1 - guys on the ovens wear longjohns even in the summer UNDER the green denim fire resistant jacket and pants they are required to wear.  Some even get in the shower with them before going on the job to try and help stay cool.

2 - Guys working the top of the ovens wear oak wood soled sandals over their work boots because it will melt your boots and feet.

3 - all emissions from the ovens, particles and gas, are carcinogenic.  Showers are required after a shift by OSHA and EPA.  All work clothes are washed by a EPA certified laundry.

4 - no one knows what dirt is until you work at a coke plant.  Sad thing is it's not just dirt.  It causes cancer.

I could probably think of more but you get the idea.
Thank God for having enough education to be able to work a technical job and not have to get right in it.  I never went near the ovens except when there was an instrumentation problem.

[JimCt]

I take my hat off to the folks who work at jobs like that.