| Author |
 Topic  |
|
Doc
Keeper of the Scrolls
2010 Posts
|
|
 Posted -
28/05/2004
:
16:35
|
LANCASHIRE TEXTILE PROJECT
TAPE 78/AI/01
THIS TAPE HAS BEEN RECORDED ON SEPTEMBER 21ST 1978IN THE ENGINE HOUSE AT BANCROFT SHED WHILE THE ENGINE IS RUNNING ON A NORMAL WORKING DAY. THE INFORMANT IS STANLEY GRAHAM, THE INFORMANT IS STANLEY GRAHAM WHO IS THE ENGINEER AT THE MILL.
Now the reason why I am making this tape today, here, is that today is Thursday 21st of September. On Tuesday 19th September we finally got the word that we have been expecting for a long time now that this mill is going to weave out on December 22nd. In other words, we are all going to be redundant, out of a job. This is no shock but it’s very sad. I think everybody feels the same way about it. It's a shame, Bancroft is a happy place to work at, and it seems that happy places to work at can’t make money these days.
(50)
What I intend to do this morning ... I should say that it’s seven minutes past eight, we have just started up, the shed light’s in, in other words there is a fair load on the engine, we are running at about 120 pound of steam, there's not much weaving load on because we have only got about 200 looms running, 220 looms running, but the shed light’s putting 1oo or 120hp on to the drive and anybody who is an expert on Corliss valves will be able to tell by the noise in the background that the valves are running on about 50% cut off. The engine's probably turning out about 300-350 hp at the moment. Now, as I say, the reason for making this tape this morning is because everything’s fresh on our mind about redundancy and from now on the load will go down on the engine and the plant and if we don’t do a recording of some of the sounds in the mill now I’m afraid we won't get them because these things'll catch up on us faster than we think.
I should just explain one or two things about the actual mechanics of weaving a shed out. It has to be understood that weaving like any other
(l00)
manufacturing process is as it were a pipeline, raw materials are going in at one end and finished cloth coming out at the other. When I say finished cloth, grey cloth in our case, which in the terms of the trade is unfinished cloth, but we are actually manufacturing cloth. Now obviously we have to contract for our raw materials and people also contract with us to supply then with cloth so it isn't possible to just shut the doors and go home and say ‘That’s it, Bancroft's finished.’ We have to honour our yarn contracts, and we have to honour our cloth contracts as well. So in effect what this means is that Bancroft will now - as we say in the trade - start to weave out. In other words, as cloth contracts finish, as orders are fulfilled, machine’s will be shut down and they won't start up again. As the number of looms drop, so the number of weavers will drop. We still have some sets to tape but as soon as those sets have been taped, obviously the taper will go. So we are now entering a period of rapid decline which will last about three months and we shall weave out on or about 22nd of December. It may be
(150)
a day or two earlier. Who knows, we might have a little more to do, I don't know but it will be something like that. We shall finish up the mill will in effect be run by three or four men, the last tackler and possibly one weaver will be weaving out. Jim the manager will still be here because he has got his twelve week notice and of course I shall still be here to provide motive power. I shall make sure the fire beater's also here as well. I can see the situation arising where the management will say that due to the decreased load, we don’t need a fire beater. Well in actual fact this is wrong, because as the load decreases on the engine it becomes more difficult to run In many ways the easiest engine to run is a fairly heavily loaded engine because you have no problem about suddenly fluctuating load as there in plenty of capacity and plenty of power going out. But on very small loads you only need somebody to shut down one small thing and you could probably lose 25% of your load, which can mean your governor flying out. When I say the governor flying out, it moves in such a violent way that the safety gear overrides everything and shuts the steam off to the engine and stops it. However, I shall surmount these difficulties by
(200)
running the engine at a lower pressure as we go on. Obviously there is a point where you reach a pressure, there in not much point running actually at below 80psi. pressure because you start to burn more coal. But what we’ll do is just go for a little walk and listen to some of the sounds of a Lancashire mill running. Now, unfortunately we can’t record the tapes because they aren't running. It's possible that they will run at some future date but in actual fact the noise that the tapes make is not very striking, it’s only a rumble of gears and an occasional click. The striking things really are the sound of the stokers on the boiler, obviously the sound you can hear in the background is the engine, and the weaving shed itself. A Lancashire loom is a very noisy thing. A lot of firms have spent a lot of money trying to quieten them down. Some of the modern looms are even more noisy, it's impossible to work in some weaving sheds without ear defenders, in other words ear pads or muffs or ear plugs to physically stop the sound getting into your ears. I have a friend who inadvertently went into one of these sheds and spent about two hours in there one morning and finished up it made him physically sick. Lancashire looms don’t have that
(250)
effect an you but they do make a lot of noise and it is a very striking place when you first go in. In point of fact nobody wears ear defenders in a Lancashire weaving shed, it isn't bad enough for that but it should be said at the same time that most weavers finish up with some impairment to their hearing after five, ten, fifteen, twenty years in the shed. Now
(10 min)
Bancroft Shed was built originally to take over 1000 looms. This was what was referred to when it was built, as a 1000 loom shop. This was reckoned to be a nice sized unit, a good, profitable size unit. There is actually room in the shed for about l,150 looms. At the moment in that shed there'll be about 450 to 500 and of these only just over 200 are running so the noise is nowhere near what it would have been in the old days when all the looms were running at the same time. There is one advantage to this, it will mean that we can walk up under the shaft and listen to the shafting itself, the line shaft, the main shaft which goes from the second motion pulley right the way up the mill, 300 feet up the mill and everything else is driven off it. And we'll be able to walk up that and, due to the fact that there are no looms at that side of the shed we'll be able to listen to the noise of the power going up the shaft. Actually, the noise is caused by the
(300)
fact that the gearing is cast iron and is not as accurate as it would be made nowadays under ideal conditions. A good gear running under ideal conditions is virtually silent. Our gears about their purpose out to the world. They, nobody can describe them as silent. It's worth mentioning here that in the old days this wasn’t seen as any great disadvantage and you would often hear an engineer say "Oh they'll be all right, leave them alone. They'll sort it out between themselves in the finish.” In other words they’d wear into each other. One interesting point about the gears, for anybody who is listening to this tape who is technically minded, they have a hunting tooth in, in
other words they are not, they don't have the same number of teeth in. This
means that the teeth aren’t mating with exactly the same tooth every timed. If you had two big gears and they each had 100 teeth in, the same teeth would mate with the same teeth each time and you get a lot of localised wear. If you put a hunting tooth in one, in other words put 101 teeth in one gear and 100 in the other, or 99 in one and 100 in the other, this is called putting a hunting tooth in. It's easy to see, if you just think about it that the teeth would be moving round and meeting a different tooth each time. This evens out wear, localized wear and eventually you do get a quieter running gear. But I’m afraid the theory doesn’t always work, there was a famous pair of bevels in Earby that, well you could hear them from one end of the main street in Earby to the other for years at Victoria Shed, and they never did quieten themselves down until the mill was finished. Anyway that’s enough about gearing, what we'll do first is have a quiet walk down and listen to the stokers running in the boiler house.
(350)
Well we're outside now, in the boiler house yard. I don’t know whether you can hear the birds singing but it’s a grand morning, blue skies, just a little bit of smoke coming out of the chimney but not much and in a second or two I shall just walk across to the boiler house# and we'll listen to the sound of the stokers running away. The boiler at Bancroft Shed is a single Lancashire boiler, it’s 30 ft x 9 ft - which is a big boiler by anybody’s standards- and is fired by coal. Now, in the old days, when they put a boiler in, when I say in the old days - up to probably about 1880, boilers were all hand fired, what we call handball, banjo work. The fire beater just kept shovelling coal in as and when it was needed in order to keep the steam up. This is one of the reasons why in the old days there was so much smoke from factory chimneys, because in order to shovel coal into the fire it was necessary to open the firebox door obviously. And when you open the firebox door, you allow a lot of cold air to get into the fire which upsets the combustion conditions, in other words hand firing of a boiler automatically leads to imperfect combustion. If you have got a fire that’s running just right with just the right amount of air going in both beneath the bars and over the bars to burn smokeless - the noise you can just hear
(15 min) (400)
in the background probably is the auger that's putting coal up to the stokers. If you have just got the exact amount of air going in to the firebox to burn smokeless, in other words to burn efficiently because that’s what smokeless burning is, it's efficient burning, it's obvious if you open the door you are going to upset all those conditions and you have got to get smoke. In fact as we are running now with the stokers, if we were to allow excess air to go over the top of the fire we would get smoke straight away. In point of fact that is one of our difficulties. Over the last few months Barnoldswick has become a smokeless area. Now in actual fact this made no difference to us in certain respects as industry has been running smokeless, or has been governed by rules about producing smoke, for a matter of, I’m not sure what the exact date is, but a matter of 20 or 25 years and domestic fires weren’t covered by these regulations. In other words we could be prosecuted for making black smoke whereas nobody with a domestic fire could be prosecuted for making smoke out of their house chimney. Now a few months ago Barnoldswick, or our area of Barnoldswick was made into a smokeless zone. Now this meant that the domestic fires weren’t allow to make smoke. Now nobody had really bothered about the odd bit of smoke coming out of Bancroft chimney before but as soon as the domestic fires were stopped from making smoke people began to ask questions why was Bancroft allowed to make smoke when nobody else could. Now, these stokers that we have on - the proper name for them is the Proctor wide ram unit coking stoker - now they are, in point of fact a very good stoker, they are fairly reliable, a bit heavy on spares but they are not a bad stoker at all
(450)
as long as you have got a fairly heavy load on. In other words, the efficiency of the stoker depends on the length of the fire in the firebox. Now our fire bare here are 6 ft internally, in other words the firebed itself in each tube of the boiler in 6 ft long by about 3 ft wide. Now under the conditions that we run under now - obviously with only 200 looms instead of 1000 looms and one tape instead of three tapes and less electrical load we don’t need to fire as heavy as they used to do in the old days. Now again it's obvious if you think about it, this boiler was big enough to carry the load of the shed when it was running as a 1000 loom shop so now it's severely under loaded. In other words the fires are running very light. Now with this type of stoker which has walking bars in which the bars move in such a way that they quietly move the fire down the box away from the stoker, the coal’s burning as it goes - until eventually it drops over the end of the bars into the ashpit as totally burnt clinker and ash. The efficiency of your fire depends on having your bars full right to the back of fire. In other words the coal wants complete combustion, in other words turn into clinker and ash, nothing but clinker and ash just as it reaches the back of the fire bars otherwise you get a dead patch at the back of the bars, which is thin and allows excess air through. So that what you are doing is allowing excess air into your combustion chamber, which spoils combustion condition, and it is in point of
(20 min)
fact almost impossible to run Proctor coking stokers on a light load, that is a short fire and run them smokeless. Now this is our trouble, we have realized this for a long time and well 18 months ago I pointed out to the
(500)
management that great savings could be made by altering the method of firing. Now, the easy way to do it would have been to go over from the wide ram unit coking stoker to underfired stokers. Now the underfired stoker is a different principle altogether, it is a firebrick pot inside the combustion chamber completely sealed off from the outside, and coal is forced up a tube by an auger into the pot where it is ignited by burning coal which is already there and the correct amount of air for the amount of coal that you are putting through is blown up into this pot as well. So in other words you can put the exact amount of air that you want with the exact amount of coal that you want in order to promote ideal combustion conditions in that furnace. Which means, in effect that you could run at any level of load, smokeless. Which also means that you can run more efficiently, save coal and in point of fact if we’d fitted these underfired stokers we could have shown a saving of probably about 10%. It's worth noting that the government is aware of this sort of thingy and there is at present a scheme whereby if you can show that an improvement you intend to make to your plant is going to show a saving of 10% or more on energy cost the government will give you a 25% grant towards it, and I'm sure that we could have qualified for this grant. The cost of putting these stokers in would have been, at this time about £8000, that included the stokers, the necessary brickwork and necessary electrical work. We could have put them in complete for about £8000. At the time when I put this suggestion up I was told that we hadn’t any money. Anyway early on this year, I first put this up in about 1977. Earlier this year I pointed out to them that we did have the money because we had 200 tons of coal in stock up the yard which at about £35 a ton, which is about £7000 and I pointed out to them that if we
(550)
burned the stock it would put the coal account £7000 in credit which, together with any grants or anything that we could get hold of would enable us to put these stokers in, actually for no money at all. And in point of fact if we had put them in and ordered the same amount of coal for the next year, 12 months later we would have, when I say ordered the same amount of coal, ordered the same amount that we would with the Proctor stokers. We’d finish up with brand new stokers, and our 200 ton of coal in stock again up the yard. Because we are burning about 1000 tons a year, and our savings would have been at the very least, 10%, and there you are, we could have had the stokers for nothing. But that's all water under the bridge now and we are running out for the last three months on the old Proctor Stokers, we are still making just a little trace of smoke, but I have no doubt that the smoke people will leave us alone now. And even people like that don't kick a dog when it's down, and we are certainly down. Now, we'll just walk across now into the boiler house itself. In the old days the stokers would be driven by pulleys from the shafting, in fact the shafting is still in but nowadays we run them with electric motors (sound of the stokers running).
(600)(25 min)
That's the sound of the stokers running. The moaning noise you can hear is hydraulic gear boxes which are driven by electric motors which move the ram which forces the coal in and the bars which go backwards and forwards. The hissing noise in the background is under fire steam which is a small quantity of steam blown through pipes under the fire bars, not as some people think to improve the draught or cool the fire bars, but simply to promote a chemical effect in the bed of burning coal which means that the clinker won't stick to the bars. It also improves the combustion of the coal. Water on coke, which is in effect what it is in there of course, produces water gas which is in itself flammable. It's a debatable point whether we should be blowing steam underneath, I’ve often thought that it's a very inefficient way of doing it, it seems to me that atomised water could do just as well. And if you work out what the steam costs you that you are blowing under the bars for a year it's fantastic. It's amazing what this is in a ½ inch pipe. This is cracked right down, but it's amazing what a ¼ inch orifice will use in a year and steam is a very valuable commodity. I don't know whether you can hear a rumbling noise in the background, I'll just walk down the side of the boiler. The boiler is separated from the shed by a 6ft wide passage and a very thick brick wall. This brick wall is the wall on which the brackets are mounted which carry the transmission shaft up the side of the mill. I'm getting down the back of the boiler here now, we are getting away from the noise of the stokers. I'm walking down the side of the economisers now which are a nest of cast iron tubes which stand in the flue at the back of the boiler and the feed water for the boiler is pumped through these tubes which of course pre-heat it and gives us a saving on the boiler. This is exactly the same principle as putting
(650)
hot water in the kettle at home, it boils quicker and you use less power. I’ll just turn the level up a little bit here and see if you can hear the shaft (sound of lineshaft rumbling). That low rumble is something which you can get used to working in a power driven steam mill like this, it's the sound of the vibrations from the gearing being transmitted through the wall. It's a very comforting sound in many ways because you know that if that gearing's rumbling like that your wage is going on. Of course in about three months that gearing will fall silent and no matter. There is a possibility that the engine might be used for generating electricity, if anybody buys the mill that would be the economic thing to do but one thing is certain, that the shafting will be done away with. So that noise won't be heard any more. The boiler house is a dirty place, there’s no getting away from it. It’s no good saying it isn’t because we are burning coal. Coal's dusty dirty stuff. We whitewash once a year for two reasons, one to keep it clean, and the other is that if we whitewash the settings of the boiler, the brickwork round the boiler, it does seal up a lot of little cracks and stop air leaks which again leads to more efficient combustion. We walking back now to the front of the boiler. The firebeater is often regarded as the lowest form of life in the mill next to the loom sweeper because he is generally mucky. He can’t help that but the fact is that without a good firebeater the engineer's lost. The firebeater is the start of the process, he is burning coal to make steam which powers and heats everything in the mill, it’s used for the processes, everything. A bad firebeater can soon waste half a ton of coal a day, he can make everybody else's efforts, economic production, just
(700)
absolutely useless. This fact has never been realised at Bancroft. The firebeater has never been paid a wage which measures up with his responsibilities. It should also be said that he is working with something which is very, very dangerous. A Lancashire boiler is in effect, a tank 9 ft across and 30 ft long with about 6000 gallons of superheated water in it and steam at anything up to160 lbs pressure. A boiler is in effect a big bomb. In the old days they used to say that in a boiler this size running at 140psi there was enough energy to lift the boiler and its contents 7000 ft into the air. Which isn’t a bad way of describing the power that’s locked up in there. You realise this when you blow the boiler off, in other words let the steam off it when you are going to do any maintenance. The noise is fantastic, a 3” pipe blowing steam at 140psi directly into the atmosphere is in many ways a frightening thing. And when you come to consider it takes about 20 minutes to blow off, if you imagine all that energy being released in a matter of a fraction of a second, if the casing of the boiler ever fractured or there was an accident, it gives you some idea of the destruction and damage that can be caused. Anyway, we'll go out of the boiler house now and back into the engine house. The boiler house is of course right next to the engine house. This is deliberate, the shorter the steam pipe to the engine, the better. As a matter of interest at Bancroft Shed we always considered that they were working under difficulties here. For some reason I don’t know what it was, I think that there was perhaps bad bearing ground next to the engine house. Because the boiler house should have been built the opposite way around to what it is. It should have been built so that the back of the boiler was as close to the engine house as possible in order to keep the pipe short, the steam pipe to the engine short. But in fact they built it the other way and there are certain indications in the warehouse and in the bottom of the bunker that there is perhaps some form of spring water coming up or something like that which would have made it dangerous to site a boiler over
(750)
it. Because obviously a boiler on brick settings, you want it on firm ground. And I think they realised this when they built it and that's why the boiler house is built as it is. It’s actually detached from the engine house. The engine house itself is a beautiful building built of dressed stone with rubble face, sawn lintels, big windows down either side and a very big window at the end. In the cellar the engine beds are absolutely solid. Of course they have got to be. I have heard it said that the engine house actually costs more than the engine but in fact this isn't true from our own researches in Barnoldswick. We have found out that this wasn’t actually true. It was amazing how cheaply an engine house could be built. It seems that labour was so cheap in those days and that materials could be bought cheaply because of course that was locally cut and dressed stone. The mortar of which they were built was local lime ground up with ashes from the local mills and everything was obtainable locally and there was plenty of cheap labour and it meant that the actual fabric of the building was one of the cheapest things to put up. The engine of course had to be bought from away and entailed, even in those days fairly skilled men and of course that was more expensive. So now we'll have a walk down into the
(35 min) (800)
cellar. The cellar is where the pumps live. There are three pumps, the largest sits right in front of you as you come through the cellar door. Now this pump is the condenser pump or air pump. Now I’ll just let you have a listen to him (sound of pump working). You’ll notice that that pump is moving at about the same beat, about the same speed as the engine. The reason for that is that it is driven directly off the tail slide of the low pressure cylinder. It is pumping water out of the dam and as it pulls it out of the dam it drags it through the jet condenser. Now the jet condenser is a
conical shaped vessel with a ring of holes in the top that the water sprays through so filling it with a spray of cold water, and into the jet condenser the exhaust pipe of the low pressure cylinder enters at the top. Now the effect is that the steam from the engine meets the cold water in the jet condenser, it is condensed, forms a vacuum and the condensed water, condensed steam, the condensing water and any air present which has been released in the boiler or got in through leaks in the engine, on the vacuum side is dragged out of the bottom with the water as it comes through from the
dam. It then runs back to the dam and we just circulate it over and over again. The idea of this is to give us a vacuum on the back end of the engine. This vacuum is about 25 inches of mercury in our case which is about –10psi which in fact gives us 10psi of steam free. It has exactly the same effect as raising the pressure of steam at the high pressure side of the engine by 10psi and makes the engine more economical. This was actually James Watt’s greatest contribution to the steam engine I always say. The outside condenser. I should say that the air pump at Bancroft is one of Roberts’s own air pumps and it was always reckoned that they are the worst bloody air pumps in the world. It’s got just about everything wrong with it that an air pump could have. And, it really does need looking after. Without going into the technicalities too much the reason why it in so bad is that the designer tried one or two innovations in the hope that he could improve the air pump because the air pump always was a source of trouble. Unfortunately he had the wrong bloody ideas altogether and he finished up making it worse. The best air pump ever invented actually was the Edwards which - I shan't go into the details of it now, but the piston
(850)
itself had no valves in it. It was just a cone which went into a seating and actually squirted the water through the pump. It were a very efficient, quiet, trouble free pump and it was recommended in about 1930 that this air pump be taken out of Bancroft and that an Edwards be put in in its place but nobody ever got on with it, it was never done. Which is a shame really because the increased efficiency they would have got out of the engine would have more than paid for the pump in the first two or three years. And for ever after that it would have been running at a profit. But there you are, the management didn't feel they could spend the money. Now we’ll have a walk down the side of the engine bed now and you'll hear a high pitched noise in the background. (sound of the Pearn pump). Now that noise
(40 min)
is the sound of the Pearn pump. That’s Frank Pearn’s from Manchester. Which is pumping water up round the economiser. The water is drawn from the hot well, which is kept topped up with the condensate water out of the air pump, it's then forced up a pipe through the nest of cast iron tubes in the flue - the economiser behind the boiler - and then returned back down to the cellar where another pump actually forces it into the boiler. That's the pump that's just started up. This pump is controlled by a float switch and you'll hear in a second or two it'll knock off by itself. The flow of water through the economiser and hence to the boiler is controlled by a by-pass on the Pearn pump which just by-passes water from the delivery side to the intake side. And that's the other pump stopped, the big feed pump, and by a simple adjustment of a valve on the by-pass you can vary the amount of water going to the boiler from
(900)
almost nothing to full bore. We do have one more pump in the cellar but this isn't running at the moment. This is the Weir steam pump. The Weir is a very good pump, it’s still almost the standard pump in emergency applications, stand by applications. We only use it now if we have an emergency, if all the electric power goes off or a fuse blows, anything like that. What it means is that, as long as there is steam in the boiler we have a means of putting water into that boiler and when you consider that the biggest danger with a boiler is running with low water you can see how important this is. Well we are out of the cellar again now, back in the boiler house yard. That's just a short trip round the boiler and the cellar. Of course the other item of interest in the boiler house yard is the chimney. It's a brick chimney, iron banded, approximately 135ft, about 12ft overall diameter at the bottom, about 8ft at the top. The usual taper on a chimney, or batter as they call it, was an inch in three foot. I think this one is probably about that. This is what they call a buttress chimney, in other words the construction is an outer skin of brickwork about three or four bricks thick, a cavity which is split up by buttresses running up inside then another skin of brickwork about two or three bricks thick and then another small cavity, and then the inside liner of firebrick which runs up about the first 30 ft of the chimney. The liner is to protect the bottom of the chimney from excess heat when you are firing hard because otherwise that would crack it. The chimney is made of special bricks, which are made circular with a circular face so that you get a nice smooth cylinder. The way to look after the chimney is to get the steeple-jacks in once a year, I say once a year, that's a mistake, once every 5 years probably to examine the chimney and cover it with boiled linseed oil, give it a coating of boiled linseed-oil. This chimney at Bancroft was done last I think about 6 years ago, 7 years ago. I think about 1971 but I am not absolutely certain of that because the engineer before me didn't keep very accurate records. I think he probably thought the place was on the verge of closing
(950)(45 min)
down and there wasn't much point doing it. And I can sympathise with him because we have been in that position for years. The chimney tapers up for about the first 110 ft to what is known as the string course, which is usually shown by a ring of masonry round the chimney, above that the brickwork is parallel up to the cantilever blocks or buttress blocks, which support the oversail or oversailer which is a rim which runs round just below the top of the chimney. From there on up to the top it's usually called the drum, and that leads right up to the actual top of the chimney. At the top is mounted the air terminal which is a copper rod with three or four points on the top. This is connected by a ¼” thick by 1 ½ “ wide copper strip right the way down the chimney into the ground down to either an old copper vessel or a grid of copper in the ground at the bottom. This is of course the lightning conductor and protects the chimney against any damage by lightning. There is something quite magnificent about mill chimneys, I don’t know what it is. Of course there is the old thing about phallic symbols but they are marvellous things. Nowadays they are finishing, they are going out rapidly. They were built up to 400 ft tall brick chimneys, in incredibly short spaces of time. As I say they are finished now, they are being felled and tin things put up in their place. And there again it’s very sad, I suppose the basic truth is that I'm very old fashioned. I like the old things, but there’s something grand about a good brick built chimney with a bit of ornament on top of it. And I am afraid I can’t find much to go overboard about in one of the new steel chimneys. Well, I seem to have made a pretty good job of judging this tape, we are just about reaching the end so we'll finish now and do the engine and the weaving shed - not necessarily in that order on the other side of this tape.
SCG/03 September 2003
6,195 words.
Back to Stanley Graham's Page
|
|
|
|
Stanley Graham (Engineer & Researcher) Tape 01
