Control board for the hoist house.

I have a special affinity for Carrie Furnace.  She was my first abandoned factory, and she’s very close to home, so it’s always nice to plan a return trip.  Not to mention the fact that I always find something new!  Last weekend, I had a leisurely excursion and got a bunch of shots from new angles and places I hadn’t yet seen.

I’m never happy with my blast furnace shots, so I tried another one…the sunlight was pretty harsh, so I’ll be trying that again the next time I’m there.  The majority of the shots I’m posting come from either (a) the hoist house (which was used to power the cables that lifted ore into the furnaces) or (b) the high line, where incoming supply cars emptied their contents.  Take a peek into a National Historic Landmark.

-aigulf

Bell heaters for the annealing mill. Each one fits over a single stack of ribbon coils.

Steel is delivered to the site in ribbon coils, from a steel furnace. You can see one of the coils, in fairly poor shape, next to my friend in the shot below. The first stage is to remove the oxidation, that’s where the pickling line comes in. The ribbons are fed through acid tanks to remove the oxidation layer, and then recoiled. In the gallery below, there is a shot of the pickling tanks, though there isn’t much to see.

Coil of Steel Ribbon (with friend for scale)

The ribbons are then fed into the temper mill, which hardens the steel. From there, the tandem mill produces whatever thickness the customer desires in the steel ribbons. I wasn’t able to get any decent shots of the tandem mill, as it was shrouded by tarps to keep it warm, or the temper mill, because the shot I took didn’t turn out very well.

An unfortunate side effect of the cold mills is that the steel loses some of its workability, and is more difficult to stamp or press. In order to counter this effect, an annealing mill carefully heats the steel to its re-crystallization temperature, allowing the crystals to re-align, and then it is slowly cooled back to room temperature for delivery. Annealing is carried out in several different ways. In the photos below you can see pillars of corrugated metal. These pillars cover a stack of three or four coils, and help control the heating and cooling rates. These pillars can be heated individually with a heating bell, or in groups of three via a heating box. I’m not sure of the benefits/drawbacks of the two techniques, but you can see that both are in use interspersed in the same facility below.

You can view these photos in a flickr set.

Blast House

I had another adventure with friends last weekend, to probably the best site I’ve seen so far. We were there for 6 hours, I took ~400 photos and was excited to go home and sort through them for goodies. Unfortunately, I had to turn around and go out to a semi-formal party, and I wanted to bring my camera. So I dumped the photos onto my computer, and pulled the card to use again. When I went back the next day to process the photos, only 50 of the 400 were there. Son of a bitch.

I downloaded some data recovery tools, and they managed to salvage 50 more, but not any of the ones I wanted from the blast furnace, casting mill, rolling mill, or massive ladles for hauling molten steel. All the cool shots I got are gone.

This is a lesson for me. Don’t wipe the card until you’ve verified that the photos are indeed in place. No more using picasa’s built-in “delete the photos that are copied” feature. I’ll copy them. Make sure they’re all there, and then use the camera’s built-in format function to wipe the card.

Thankfully, though, I was not alone on Saturday. Below are a few shots of mine, and three that I’ve borrowed from a friend.

-aigulf

P.S. I have facebook connect running, so you can leave a comment with your fb login, if you like.  If you do so, you will be asked whether you’d like the comment also posted to your wall.  Isn’t integration fun?

Emergency Alarm

Another little gem. This former casting plant looks like the factory that builds other factories…or at least, the machinery that goes into them. We would have spent a long time exploring, but the weather was unbelievably bitter cold. We were expecting 25° F, and got 5° F…45 minutes was all we could handle.

Be sure to check out these photos on flickr if you want to comment on them.

-aigulf

Commutators

This weekend held another expedition, but I’m going to be a little vague on where. Wouldn’t want too many people to find it and spoil the fun.

Our destination this time was an abandoned blast furnace, and boy were we surprised.  The facility is significantly larger than we originally thought.  Every time we turned a corner, it seemed like we were greeted with an expanse of new buildings and half-gutted machinery.  Needless to say, this place will necessitate a return trip or two.

-aigulf