Robert Pence

I have some video somewhere that I shot of an older version of these engines, with less shrouding and more exposed moving parts. It's quite impressive to see all that massive machinery moving in perfect sychronization. I should digitize the video if the tape hasn't died from old age yet, and post a clip. These big internal combustion engines are only slightly evolved from the huge steam engines that were their immediate predecessors in industrial settings that required enormous amounts of power. They are built with pairs of cylinders placed end-to-end rather than side-by-side like an automotive engine, and each cylinder has a cylinder head, valves and ignition at both ends so that power is applied to the piston in both directions. A common piston rod runs through both cylinders, passing through seals where it passes through the cylinder heads. The piston rod and pistons are hollow, and water is pumped through the inside of the rod and pistons to keep them cool. This photo: shows the piston rod emerging from the cylinder head of the second cylinder. The rod travels back and forth 36 inches when the engine is in operation, at a speed of about twice per second. 125 revolutions per minute may seem slow compared with modern automobile engines that turn in the thousands, but with that much mass it's pretty impressive. The horizontal shaft that runs along the left side of the engine is a camshaft that operates the valves via pushrods that can be seen angling upward and downward. Intake valves that admit a mixture of air and natural gas are on top of the cylinders, and exhaust valves are on the bottom. The square boxes located at intervals above the camshaft, with tubes coming out of them are lubricators that are driven by the camshaft and distribute metered amounts of oil to the various moving parts. The engines were started by admitting compressed air into the cylinders to bring them to near operating speed, and then turning off the compressed air and turning on the gas. Once they were rolling, the flywheel inertia did the cranking. I think these engines were installed about 1937. They may have been among the last of the tandem horizontal engines produced. The design goes back to at least the early 1900s. Tandem engines were built by Worthington, Cooper-Bessemer, Mesta, and probably others I don't know about, and were used in pipeline stations, municipal and private industrial electric plants, steel mills, and powered the San Francisco cable cars before they were replaced with electric motors. I think that took place in the 1950s.

One of the things that bothers me a lot is that even people who don't consciously subscribe to the born-again Christian fundamentalist movement seem to be living witn an end-times mindset. If they believe that they will have several generations of descendants, how can they squander the earth's resources for their own immediate gratification without concerning themselves about the legacy they're leaving for future generations, in energy and raw material depletion and in environmental degradation.

Nice shots! Such a beautiful city!

Pretty neat stuff! Re the vinyl siding job -- Examples of bad taste here and there just help the rest stand out more. :|

< :speech: > Man, does that prompt an elegy/tirade. I dare not even start it here, nor undertake it until I have a lot of time. I'll just say here that almost all the "economic growth" cited by everyone from politicians to new urbanists is an illusion. The perceived rebirth of the cities, with expensive condos and neighborhoods populated by people whose wealth derives directly or indirectly from the manipulation of financial instruments, will ultimately collapse because the people who are spending the nation's wealth are doing so without contributing to the generation of real wealth. Too many people are living high and running up debt on the backs of workers. They've looted the nation's industrial base for short-term gain and set us up for long-term decline into third-world status. </ :speech: > (for now)

Oh, yes! That description revives memories. I never visited the Ford plant, but I grew up with stories and occasional visits to heavy industry. My dad worked for General Electric, and made frequent trips to industrial clients. When he came home, he always had vivid narratives of the spectacle. He visited steel mills and Lima Locomotive when they were building massive steam locomotives, and fostered a love of heavy industry in me. As an apprentice machinist-toolmaker at General Electric in the late 1950s, I went on field trips to Fisher Body at Marion, Indiana, where they stamped body panels for GM cars and trucks, and Joslyn Steel in Fort Wayne, a producer of specialty stainless steel alloys for products like jet engine turbine blades. We saw the whole process at Joslyn, from melting in electric-arc furnaces, to casting to rolling big coils of rod from ingots. The images are still vivid in my memory of white-hot ingots moving slowly into the first set of rolls, and the speeds increasing as the rod was rolled smaller and smaller, until it became a glowing snake that seemed to fly out of the final stage. At each end of the rolling mill, men with tongs manually flipped the rod over and headed it back through the next stage; a slip could have resulted in a worker instantly losing a limb or being sliced in half. Perhaps the most spectacular trip was to the International Harvester plant in Fort Wayne. In the forging shop, a cavernous dirt-floored World War I-era brick building, brightly-glowing steel billets were shaped into suspension and drive-line components for heavy trucks by towering steam-powered drop hammers. With each blow of the forging hammers, the floor trembled and sparks flew. The noise was deafening.

I think so. Would that have been on or visible from US 33? I was there only for a couple of days, being driven around by a friend who lived there. It was pretty late at night when we got to the waterworks. We had spent a lot of time in the areas south and east of Columbus visiting some oil wells and small pipeline stations out in the boonies that were still running with early-1900s engines and machinery. Maybe I should dig up some of that and post it in the Great Peak Oil Thread.

Great thread. My friend, David, lived in Tremont for a while about 15 years ago. I didn't find it all that scary right where he lived, but it was a little sketchy in places, especially at night. Tremont was the setting for parts of The Deer Hunter (1978 - Robert Di Niro, Christopher Walken, ...) They used Lemko Hall and St. Theodosius, along with some steel mill scenes.

For one thing, the massive amount of cast iron dampens vibration; I'd guess the flywheels weigh thirty to forty tons each, and I'd hate to even try to speculate on the weight of the entire machine. It sits on a solid concrete footing that may be ten to fifteen feet deep, or even deeper. The machinery is well-balanced and the speeds are relatively low. Corliss-valved engines usually operate slower than 100 revolutions per minute, and these had a maximum speed of 76 rpm. Even at that speed, though, a machine of that size has a lot going on, and when you stand close to it (you can walk between the uprights and the flywheels) with that much iron moving around you, the perception of power is pretty awe-inspiring. I like to try to imagine the foundry and machine shop operations that built these. Engines like this are designed to fully expand the steam, extracting as much of the heat energy as possible, and they usually exhaust into condensers that recover the water and feed it back to the boilers, so there's no exhaust blast like there is with a steam locomotive or farm traction engine. Many engines of this type worked in industry and municipal power plants and waterworks for fifty to seventy-five years before the labor costs associated with maintenance and boiler operations brought about their replacement by diesels and electric motors. The massive amounts of metal and the low operating speeds, combined with meticulous attention to detail in manufacturing and setup, let them run continuously for long periods. With proper operation and rigorous attention to lubrication and on-the-go adjustments, sometimes they ran for ten years or longer without being shut down.

Sorry. I can't help it I'm a machinery geek. And when it comes to machinery, size definitely matters! This is a Holly Triplex Steam Pump that I photographed at Christmastime in 1962 in the Columbus waterworks. It was one of three installed in 1908, and each had a capacity of about 1 million gallons per hour at 76 rpm maximum speed. The part that you see towering three stories above the floor is a three-cylinder, triple-expansion Corliss-valve steam engine. The pump cylinders were beneath the floor, in the basement. These massive engines were almost completely silent in operation, except for a rhythmic click-pop, click-pop made by the valve mechanism. See what happens when I stay up too late? :-)

Short 'n sweet. Good pics!

Somehow I've managed to slip under his radar. :-o

Doesn't take much to amuse some folks! :wink:

Excellent use of layover time!

Very nice! Actually I think it's a double rainbow. See the second one, very faint, just above the tip of Terminal Tower?

Watch for what you think is a cheap price and keep going until the needle is bumping empty, and you dare not risk going any farther. Then, stop at the next gas station you see, and fill up. No matter what the price. All the way to the top, so it won't hold another drop. I guarantee, for the next sixty miles or however far it takes the needle to move off the "full" peg, every gas station you see will have cheaper gas, probably 5 - 10 cents per gallon cheaper, than the one where you filled your tank. It always works for me when driving to and from meets.

Ha! You beat me to it! :lol: Some of those houses are amazing!

It's not unique to Ohio. That's what developers do -- leverage money in the form of grants and loan guarantees with grandiose proposals and promises they never intended to fulfill.

'Tis true. You can rent a bicycle on the island, or if I recall correctly, you can even rent a horse and buggy. Horse-drawn wagons are used for tours. When horses pull a loaded wagon uphill, sometimes they fart, and the people sitting in front catch the brunt of it. When the breeze is right, from the ferry you can catch the mingled aromas of pine trees, fudge and horse manure. Unique.

Don't some stations hold the cashier responsible for drive-offs, and withhold shortages and theft amounts from his/her pay? The pay, working conditions and hours don't always attract the best and brightest; combine those factors, and it's not hard to see how a cashier can become a vigilante. Surveillance cameras are pretty cheap, especially if you don't need a long-running recording. I think that would be a safer and more effective way to curb no-pays than laying the burden on a cashier who can't afford it.

Actually, gasoline and an occasional hotel room when attending meets are just about the only things I charge to my (one and only) credit card, and I never let the balance get too high to pay off when the monthly bill comes. There's no periodic service charge on the card, and if I pay the full balance with each bill, there's no interest. Using my card for pay-at-the-pump helps me avoid standing in line in stations that smell like a blend of mildew, BO and dirty ashtray, waiting for people to decide which lottery tickets they want this time.

CVSR's operation and passenger counts are amazing compared with what they were about fifteen years ago, when I first rode. Access to the Tower City area would likely give them another huge boost, and I'd love to see it happen. Regarding the article cited by blinker12, writers who use the word, "chugging," in reference to any railroad equipment other than a steam locomotive should be required to choose either public caning or reeducation camp. :whip: I remember a newspaper article by a moron travel writer who even used the word in reference to an electric railway. Americans outside dense metropolitan areas are largely rail-illiterate, and rail-illiterate writers who perpetuate the quaint-and-cutesy, not-to-be-taken-seriously image detract from efforts to promote rail as an alternative to more expressways. Sorry. I wandered away from the topic. I'll shut up, now.

Interesting. I rather like the historic village. Good photos.

Excellent! I can't think of anyone who can make better use of the new camera. Ack! Japanese beetles: They've been munching on my giant zinnias, but the plants grow faster than the beetles can eat them. I won't spray, because the flowers attract bees and I don't want to harm the bees. The beetles' munching season will end in a few weeks, and the zinnias should continue to grow well into September and bloom through most of October.