THIS TAPE HAS BEEN RECORDED ON 26TH OF JUNE 1979 AT VICARAGE ROAD, BARNOLDSWICK. THE INFORMANT IS NEWTON PICKLES AND THE INTERVIEWER IS STANLEY GRAHAM.
Right. Now we’ll start this week by finishing Victoria Mill off. You were running it when it finally stopped weren’t you?
R-Yes, aye.
Tell me about when it finally stopped and why it stopped.
R-Well I ran it for two and a half years at night, three nights one week and two the other from Half past five until quarter to ten, for Johnson and Johnson’s, for 400 looms they had at the far end of the mill. They had an evening shift on and then it got to be as, it started to go down and down, two or three of t’other tenants went out of business and that were all the engine were driving were that four hundred looms. Or there were six hundred, it might have been 600. And with running all that time for 600 looms they came to the conclusion that they’d better be electrifying. So they electrified, they took a lot of old looms out and put part automatics in and put electric motors on and I ran the engine right out on the night shift. And that’s about it Stanley. Really, to me, that engine should have been one of the engines in the district that should have been preserved. Without any doubt at all, that one should have been preserved.
Yes. Now we did a lot of talking last week about big jobs. You know, repair jobs, breakdowns. One of the things about that, and we’ve talked a lot about it from time to time, about the various things that can cause an engine to break down, slugs of water and not oiling ‘em and this that and the other but probably the best known and most comprehensive way of smashing an engine up is what we call overspeed but there’s a lot of different names for it, for instance, Jack Platt, when I was taping him, called it ‘Running Boggart.’
R-Off at t’boggart, aye.
Off at t’Boggart aye. Well. But obviously I’m angling for Bishop House here but just before we get into that one tell me what you know about overspeeding and what you’ve seen of it.
R-Well, I haven’t seen a lot of overspeeding, not really. Because they used to be very careful these engineers about this job, such as governor ropes like we’ve talked about before and putting the low speed peg in. Now a lot of people get the wrong impression there, when we say low speed peg, how can it run away when the low speed peg’s out. Well, the low speed peg is as simple as this, that if your governor stops and drops to the bottom it knocks your valve gear out. Or such things as the governor ropes coming off and your governor dropped and you’ve no low speed peg in and it doesn’t hook off. Then your steam valves are absolutely wide open to the world and that engine’s away and nothing’ll stop it apart from shutting the stop valve. And that’s what happened at Bishop House, low speed peg wasn’t in. But why, we never knew why it had been taken off, but it definitely had been taken off because all Roberts engines with a Whitehead governor, as you very well know, have that peg in for low speed that you put in when you start and take out when you stop.
Now for a start off, Bishop House is an engine at Burnley isn’t it.
R-It was an engine at Burnley. A cross compound Roberts, gear drive.
Now of course we know it would never have overspeeded if the slow speed peg had been in.
R-Peg had been in…
But what actually caused the damage that morning? [1949. SCG]
R-What caused it. Well what caused it that morning were, th’oiler, the second in command that they’d had for donkey’s years, for some reason or another went elsewhere and they got another oiler and he had only been there a day or two. One thing about Bishop House, it were it were absolutely spotless. Floors were mopped and scrubbed and everything was just so. So the engineer shows this new oiler how to clean up. I mean, you don’t like, I’m not going to give any names for engineers in this case, but he shows him how to clean up and that’s all he had shown him. He’s cleaning up this particular morning, just after, oh I’m guessing now, about half past seven or a quarter to eight and he’s cleaning under the governor ropes. His piece of cotton waste catches in the governor ropes, goes round with them and brings the ropes off at t’governor pulley end. Now instead of jumping up and pressing the stop motion, the electrical stop motion which was on the wall behind him, not a yard away, he panicked and the engineer was in the boiler house. He’d to run out into the street to get the engineer and by the time the engineer got back he reckons that engine were doing 500rpm and it were disintegrating. Lumps of flywheel flying off and he’d to run back to the boiler house and shut the steam off at the junction valve. And he’d two boilers on at full bore and I believe the boilers blew off you know. Pressure went up and they were screaming were both boilers before they could get the dampers shut and the fires pulled. And it just literally disintegrated and there wasn’t much left of it.
Now lets get down to cases wi’ overspeeding . Now tell me whether I’m right or wrong, one of the main causes of overspeeding is the fact that the flywheel bursts because it can’t withstand the centrifugal force.
R-It can’t stand the centrifugal force.
Unless there’s something sadly wrong with the design of the engine the motion won’t be the first thing to give way under the strain of overspeed.
R-No it’s the fly wheel that’s the first thing to give way underneath the strain.
Yes, once the flywheel’s burst, well then it’s just wild.
R-It’s all out of balance and there’s lumps of metal flying about and it smashes everything up. At Bishop House case it just went all over the top of the engine house where all the tapes and the size becks and all that lot were. The beams across the engine house, they’d be eighteen inches square pitch pine, the lumps of flywheel smashed them four beams just like firewood and the tapes and everything upstairs came down on top of the engine before it stopped. And a lump of flywheel went through the wall into the shed and killed an old woman on four looms just under it. That was the hard thing about that job, that woman. It brought two rows of gutters down and all the shafting for two lengths of cross shafts. The barring engine, which was just behind the flywheel, a lump of the flywheel picked that up and it picked up the ‘A’ stand and the cylinder and threw it out through the engine house window which was on a public street. There were houses on the other side. It threw it right across the road into a bedroom, into a girls bedroom window that had just got up to go to work and it missed her. It were a miracle, it missed her and there it was, stuck in the floor, barring engine, ‘A’ stand and cylinder.
Yes. So there’d be a telephone call to Henry Brown Sons……
R-There were a telephone call to me father and I dashed on and it were all still smoking when I got there and the engineer were in a terrible state of course. There were police there and photographers and one thing and another. They’d got the old lady away across the road to the hospital but they found she was dead. My first job, first thing they could think about were to go across the road and see if you can get that lump of engine out of that girls bedroom. I mean I know it sounds comical but it wasn’t just as comical at the time what with all the sadness you know, with what had happened. And that was the first job we did that afternoon, was get that lump of metal out of that girls bedroom. I mean it stuck through the bedroom floor with its legs hanging down into the living room, what a hell of a mess they had. So me mate and I went in and we didn’t know what the hell to do with this because you can’t just hang some blocks up and lift three or four hundredweight in somebody’s bedroom! So what we did, we cleared out the living room, took all the stuff that wasn’t damaged out of the way and then we got a load of skip lids and weft box lids and waste bags and piled ‘em up in the middle of the living room and just got up there wi’ a couple of saws and we cut the beams round it and let it drop into the living room and then dragged it out of the front door. Then of course the whole performance started to get the mill running wi’ electric motors and diesel generating sets. As it were nearly Christmas like, things were a bit dicey. I went to McLarens at Leeds to see how many engines I could get and that were a funny afternoon out.
When you say engines, you mean generating sets?
R-Generating sets, engine and alternator, diesels. It were a funny afternoon because I had full authority to buy these engines, eight sets they wanted to drive the mill. McLarens took me into their office and made me really welcome of course, which they would do. Sat round in this boardroom wi’ all them blokes and they said like we’re terribly sorry but we can’t let you have these engines till sometime in January. And I said well, I can’t order on that basis, I shall have to see what the mill directors say. So I were prepared then to come back and see whether they said they could wait till the middle of January, which were another three weeks sort of thing. Anyway, one of their blokes said would you like to have a look round the factory? I said I would that. And they took me all round their works, marvellous works they had building all these sets. He said Would you like to go into the test house? I said I would so they took me into the test house, me and me mate put ear muffs on cause there’s a hell of a din in there, you couldn’t talk or anything, and there were about twelve sets of these engines all in a row running on test. So we walked round and mee-mawed at one another [Mee-mawing is mouthing words at each other without making a sound using exaggerated lip movements. This is the name the weavers, who use this technique all the time, give to it.] We came outside and took these ear muffs off and the young cap says It’s a fair order is that you know, all them engines are going to Russia. Well that did it wi’ me, being a broad Yorkshire man and one of us own mills stopped and all these people out of work and I says, You mean to tell me I can’t have any engines and all those are going to bloody Russia? Well, you are a bloody team aren’t you, well and truly. He just turned round and looked at me, went into the office, came out and he said you can have four tomorrow and we’ll deliver one a week until we’ve made the eight up. Aye, I did that, I told ‘em you look well sending ‘em to bloody Russia and we’re stuck without. Anyhow, we got the top shop running just after Christmas.
Now just let me stop you there. You got these diesel generating sets, now of course it isn’t just as easy as that because that engine were gear drive weren’t it?
R-Aye, yes.
So what that meant was that electric motors had to be put on the shafts.
R-Yes.
And those generating sets had to be installed somewhere, tell me about that, who did that job?
R-Well, they were free standing generators, they were on skids. We put ‘em all into the old air raid shelters that had been built during the war, very low buildings as you know. Then we went to various places buying second-hand electric motors and new motors, whatever we could get. Different speeds, different sizes. But the biggest fun were looking for pulleys. Now we did a simple job, we put the motors on the broad alley floor, up to t’gearing, up to t’lineshaft under which is a broad alley. We put the motors on the floor and we drove the shafts with ordinary flat belts, six inch Fenner belts, right up on to the cross shafts. But pulleys, you’ve never seen anything like it, we’d four foot pulleys on some shafts and five foot pulleys on other shafts, we’d some wood pulleys on another shaft. Anywhere that stocked pulleys we were there looking for pulleys. There were nothing uniform about it, it looked a reight comic job and then of course we made the motor pulleys to suit the speed of the motor and whatever diameter of driven pulley we had on. Anyhow, we got the place going. Now next door lower down in Thornber’s we put these diesels down in the cellar. What had been a weft cellar but they cleared it all out and we put three sets down there to run their shop. A firm came on the scene from Manchester to do the millwrighting. We put the generators down there and they came in to this millwrighting job and I can’t explain what sort of a job they did. Whoever were in charge had never done any millwrighting before. He went half way across the shed and he put two foot pulleys on the cross shafts which down there ud be about an inch and a half diameter, in the middle of the bays. What I mean be that is between the shaft hangers which is a ten foot span. He plonks the pulleys right in the centre, puts the motors directly underneath at the end of a loom and tried to drive them straight up. So we let him go on with his job, well, the first morning they tried to run…. Well I can see that woman now, she started four looms up and I watched it pull the shaft down and the belt went slacker and slacker. So this gentleman comes along and he tightens the belt and he tightens it until that bloody shaft were just like a bow and of course we had to scrap it all and start again and put all their drives on at the other end. [The cross shafts in a standard mill set up like Bancroft start at least three inch in diameter at the lineshaft end where the bevels are mounted and reduce to two inches at the far end. Some older sheds had lighter shafting and this must have been one of these.] Now we did a bit better job there, we put girders under the corbel stones and put the motors up in the air, but still we run ‘em with a flat belt as a temporary measure. Now then the engine repair job came on the carpet, we didn’t bother with that much until we got the mill running and then the engine came on the carpet and we started to get it all stripped and the debris outside and the tapes moved.
What were the damage?
R-What were the damage. Oh, the flywheel were in bits, there was nothing left of the flywheel only an odd arm or two and the second motion shaft was bent beyond recognition, it was a seven inch shaft and it had bent it like a piece of wire. There were some teeth out of the second motion pinion, teeth out of the jack wheel, segments were all gone, they were smashed up. So Roberts were brought in, they’d made the engine in the first place. The Edwards air pump were all smashed up, the air pump body, the coffin bottom, all the pipes underneath, pipes from the high to the low were all smashed, one piston rod badly bent, slide smashed, they were open slides, one at each side they were all smashed. All the lubricators and everything gone. Anyway, we got the engine house cleared out and got the second motion shaft and pinion out.
One thing that strikes me Newton, what were the flyshaft, connecting rods and cranks like?
R-They were OK. There was nothing wrong with them at all. That fly shaft were dead true they said. We didn’t machine the flywheel, Roberts rebuilt that flywheel. We made all the bolts for it out of Low Moor Iron. Roberts made new castings for the flywheel. P&R Jackson from Manchester made the jack wheel segments and a new pinion. I turned the second motion shaft, we made the air pump and all the new pipes that went with it. We were about twelve month before we got running again. But I’d a lot of arguing about that job, you see I wanted to go modern. I mean it were a must that because it had been modernised in 1926. It had two new corliss cylinders in and three new boilers. So I says Let’s go all the way now, let’s make it into a ripe drive. Well, right away, wi’ being a gear drive they were very short centres between the flywheel shaft and the second motion. Impossible everyone said, impossible. Well I said, if that firm in front of the engine house ‘ud let us take eight looms away and build a wall there we could put a countershaft in and drive off a rope flywheel on to that countershaft and drive it back.
On to the second motion.
R-On to the second motion and I’d have loved to do that and it’ud have been a rope drive engine and we could have done it with Dawson’s ropes, that’s the modern type which you only need half the number.
Aye, Speedonas.
R-Aye, Speedonas, in fact we could have done the second drive with Fenner’s ropes on the short drive and it’d have run beautiful. Anyhow me father and th’engineer and one or two more, oh no, they wanted it gear drive. So I wasn’t in agreement with this. Well I said Right, if we’re going to make it gear drive let’s have machine cut wheels. Oh no, we’re having no machine cut wheels, we’ll make ‘em cast wheels like they were before, it’s run sixty or seventy years…., you know how they were. So PR Jacksons made these wheels, we get the second motion pulley at our shop. Roberts got all the jack wheel segments at their shop. I got the second motion pinion into the lathe and one of our turners was setting it up and getting it true, or trying to. He said I can’t get this bloody thing true Newton, it’s about three quarters of an inch out. So I said just set the lathe on for a minute, let’s watch it spin round instead of just chalking it round quietly in four places. I’ve never seen anything like it, it were just like an egg. What they’d done, these people that’d cast this wheel hadn’t the experience like they had in the old days. They’d cast it with a solid boss. What I mean by a solid boss, in the old days they used to put an inch of gap into the boss so’s when the wheel cooled the contraction ‘ud go into the gap of the boss and didn’t distort the rim and the teeth. Well, what had happened with it being a solid boss the arms had gone cold and dragged it in and it were like a blooming egg.
Now what you’re saying is that they used to cut that pinion from the outside, right down one of the spokes into the middle.
R-No, they used to leave the outer rim in one piece and they split the boss and left an inch gap in it and then you used to fill that with lead afterwards, after you’d put the hoops on. They were hooped after you’d bored them and cut the keyways.
Yes, I were thinking of big bevels.
R-No, the rim were all in one piece. What happened you see, when the molten metal went hard it contracted it didn’t pull the rim out of shape when the arms shortened, it just pulled the boss open a little bit more with it being split. But to cast it whole! Anyhow, we got PR Jacksons to it and they were in a bit of a mess with this job. Me father says it doesn’t matter, you’ll have to make a new un. Well, they couldn’t afford to make a new un, it’d bankrupt them, that were the excuse. So what they did, we turned the pinion true on the top of the teeth, but you couldn’t turn the bottom of the teeth you know. So we took it back to them and they put it on their gear cutting machine and recut all the teeth, they recut them till they were true in the bottom which is all wrong of course. [It’s all wrong because by recutting the teeth, Jacksons effectively reduced the pitch slightly, that is the distance between the centres of the teeth on the pitch diameter circle. If they had machined the jack wheel segments on the flywheel in the same way and reduced the distance between the centres of the second motion shaft and the flywheel shaft to regain perfect mesh all would have been well but by doing the pinion and not the jack wheel they had produced two gears of different pitch trying to mesh with each other.] It’s all wrong and if they’d made it machine cut in the first place it would never have happened. When we got it all together and started up you never heard such a noise in all your life. I’ll never forget it first time it went round. It were just like grinding a tool on an emery wheel, sparks coming out of the teeth. We chipped at that wheel every dinnertime for six months till I got that fed up of going every dinnertime, me and me mate, to chip it. We left the engineer with a load of chisels and a hand hammer and told him to chip it himself! He he he! And it never did quieten, it ran, oh it were terrible. It ran like that for the rest of it’s days, very noisy. Aye, it were never a good job that flywheel, never. Fly wheel itself were a good job but the gearing made ten times as much noise as it did originally, through rotten teeth and it just ran on and on. It never gave any trouble as far as hot bearings or owt like that but the noise was terrible. You could hear it at the top of Burnley when it were running.
I think I’ve heard someone say that. I mean what we’re talking about now is a lost art. I know that people will say that there’s plenty of technology about nowadays to make things like that but the thing is that the technology isn’t available in ordinary foundries like it was then.
R-It wasn’t available, it had gone. That period of gearing from the late 1800s to say about 1950 odd, the technique was there to make them wheels. If somebody had just rung me father up and asked him to go on there wouldn’t have been any problem making those wheels because he’d have just simply told ‘em, Hey, what you doing with that, make it with a split boss, you’ll have no joy if you make it whole. You see they’d got that used to making machine cut ones that didn’t need a split boss because they were machined all over before the teeth were cut. So they made a cast one, with cast teeth in it just the same way as they’d make one for a machine cut job, for machine cut teeth. And that’s why I wanted to put machine cut gears in it. But you see Victoria Mill at Earby had machine cut gears and they ran beautiful they did. But oh no, they wouldn’t. So me father and the engineer and Teddy Wood from Proctor and Proctor, no they wouldn’t listen to me about putting machine cut gears on. And then I had another flash in the pan wi’ ‘em. There were a turbine mill in Rochdale somewhere that were turbine driven. A thousand horse turbine that had come to a standstill and I wanted to go and have a look at that. Anyhow we got as far as going to have a look at this turbine but no, it all fell through. When we came back, No, th’old do, let’s repair the old engine. But I were longing to have a do at putting that turbine in because I’d never had a do at one before.
So you wanted to put a turbine in instead of the engine?
R-I did, yes I did aye off a mill that had stopped in Rochdale that cropped up.
Now then, let’s get this right. What we’re talking about is a Parsons steam turbine.
R-Aye, a two stage one. High and low pressure, aye. It had run a spinning Mill at Rochdale it were still in.
Yes. Which mill would that be?
R-Do you know I can’t remember, I could go straight to it and I can’t think of the name now.
I know one of the Shiloh Mills had one, I think it was Elk.
R-We went to look at it and it were a bit on’t big side, I think it were 1500 horse but they wanted about 900 horse to run Bishop House comfortably. And I said like, well if you put that turbine in you could put a generator in and make all your own electric. There’d have been a fair amount of excavation to do in that engine house you know to put that turbine in. All the beds would have had to come out and have a rebuild inside the house. No, they all talked about it, they had a director’s meeting. I didn’t go and it finished up we’d to repair the engine.
I don’t know, but if that had been done that could quite easily have been the only turbine driven weaving shed couldn’t it?
R-No, there were one or two. There were one at Clitheroe, I’d one at Clitheroe run with a turbine, a single stage one. And also, one at, before you get to Trawden, you know, where you turn down to the tram shed. You go down to Trawden in the bottom of the hill and there’s a village there that has a different name to Trawden.
Winewall.
R-Winewall, there was one on your left hand side, I went to that quite a lot. That was a turbine driven shop, Carr Manufacturing Company I think it was. That was a turbine driven shop because eventually they put an alternator on that turbine and took all the shafting down, took all the gearing out and we put all motors in the warehouse. It were a lovely job were that and they had a new roof put on the shed. But then it didn’t run long before it had a sad end you know as usual. Aye, two turbines, one there at Trawden and one at Clitheroe.
Which were the best way of electrifying do you think. If you were going to do it, what were the best way?
R-Best way to electrify were to electrify the shafting unless you put new looms in.
What makes you say that?
R-Unless you put new looms in because every mill you went to there were grumble, grumble, grumble about motors on these old looms wi’t weavers. They never seemed to run at the same speed two days together. And th’old looms wanted to run at the same speed as you well know. But there were nothing to beat the engine for weaving ordinary cotton. Because in bad weather they could just come into the engine house and say to you, just pull it down a bit, it’s frosty this morning and th’ends are snapping off and you could knock off a couple of revs. Then later, they’d come back and say it’s all right now and you could put it back to speed. Or vice versa, if they’d got some good stuff in can we take it up one or two and then they can earn a bit more. But you couldn’t do that wi’ electric motors. I don’t think electric motors on looms is any good only on automatics. And I still think that. Two things were deadly enemies in’t cotton trade in this area and that were electric motors on old looms, I’m not referring to new ones, and Uniflow Engines.
Ah, now then! I know we’re entering very dangerous territory here Newton!
R-Dangerous territory, Aye! He he he!
But I’ll tell you what we’ll do, I take the view that if we’re going to have the lot we’ll have the lot! Now then Mr Pickles, would you please, with as few swear words as possible, give me your considered opinion about the Uniflow. First of all tell people what a Uniflow steam engine is and then give me your considered opinion about them.
R-Well, a Uniflow steam engine [cylinder] has two inlet valves at the top and it exhausts , if anybody knows what a two stroke motor bike cylinder looks like, they know what a Uniflow engine is. It steams at each end and it exhausts through the centre. [Through ports machined around the centre line which let the steam exhaust as soon as the piston passes them.] With a Uniflow, they run at terrible high compression, piston right up to the end of the cylinder, about a sixteenth of an inch clearance, very high superheat steam. [Because there is no conventional exhaust valve at the end of the cylinder, the compression starts to rise as soon as the piston passes the exhaust ports in the middle of the stroke.] When they start up, they’re that efficient is a Uniflow you’ve to release the compression to get the bloody thing going for a start and if anybody listening to this tape ever heard a gas engine , a single cylinder gas engine run, or a single cylinder diesel, that’s how a Uniflow runs. Well, you can just imagine that [cyclic irregularity] running down through the bevels on a lineshaft at starting and stopping times, thumping and banging when it tried to get over [the compression] at the centres, smashing bevel wheels. They used to tell me at Skipton, when I started going to one at Skipton, that they’d more bevel wheels on than any other mill in Lancashire.
Which mill were that at Skipton.
R-Union Shed, they had a small one, a Newton Bean and Mitchell Uniflow. And that Uniflow engine banked most of the engine makers in this country you know. Because you’d to bore the cylinder barrel shaped to get it to run owing to the difference in expansion between the ends and the centre. The ends were hotter than the centre in a Uniflow, never uniform heat. They found out eventually how to bore these cylinders barrel shaped. I’ll not go into that, it’s a heck of job.
Why not? Go on!
R-Well, they had to bore ‘em with a bar with a sliding head that slid up a template. And it followed this template and it bored it, I don’t know what they did, a sixteenth or an eighth of an inch bigger in the centre than at the ends. That was the only way they could get them to run on high superheat. Most of them ran at about 120/180 rpm and yet there was one at Burnley that were bought at the Wembley Exhibition that they reckoned was pretty good, pretty efficient. But I never come across a Uniflow that were any good in a weaving shed. They may have been all right running an alternator and making electricity for running a weaving shed but I never came across a Uniflow that had any efficiency about it at all. I used to go to one at Holme Bridge, I used to go to that regular. Valves ‘ud be all out, you could indicate it one day and it’d be perfectly all right, you could go to it the week after and it’d be all wrong again. All this expansion business and thump. It ‘ud thump like a steam hammer and you know, just imagine all that superheat steam bashing into that cylinder. Look at the bore of them, to get any power at all they had to be thirty inch bore were the cylinders ‘cause you’d no expansion, when that piston got to the centre it was out. There were no such thing as lengthening your cut-off till it’d steam to the other end and give you more power. Your other end were leading before it had exhausted!
So you could cut ‘em off, you could have cut-off?
R-Oh aye, they’d cut off on ‘em but you couldn’t drive that engine on overload like we could say on yours at Bancroft.
No.
R-We could have driven that on until the cut-offs overlapped, past the centre of the cylinder. They couldn’t do that with a Uniflow, it blew straight down into the condenser.
Could you compound them?
R-Well, what they did, they used to make an ordinary high pressure drop valve cylinder, if they made a cross compound. And they’d Uniflow the low which were worse than making , no, they were all single cylinder ones them that were any good. But they tried cross-compounding ‘em. Making the high pressure Uniflow, sorry, I got it wrong when I said low pressure, making the high pressure Uniflow and the low pressure orthodox wi’ drop valves. So’s it took the steam into the low pressure that ran orthodox like a corliss engine.
And they weren’t any good?
R-They were no good, no, they were useless. All the engineering firms in the country had a bash at building ‘em. Roberts did and it nearly banked ‘em, they’d to scrap theirs. Burnley Ironworks made one, I think that went to India and that came back in buckets ready for going in the scrap furnace! He he he! Musgrave’s, it nearly put them out of business. There was a Belgian firm made a fair lot of success out of it at one time I believe but I never came across one of their engines. Newton Bean and Mitchell made one or two, small ones and Cole Marchant and Morley made one or two small ones. Now in the small ones I suppose they weren’t happen so bad but they were still no good for running gearing. No good at all.
There’s another thing I’d like to ask you while I’ve got it in me head. Which bears out this thing that you and I have talked about many a time, about theorists telling us what we ought to do and when you try it in practice it’s no bloody good. Now theoretically, it’s a marvellous thing to run an engine without a condenser and use the exhaust for process steam or heating.
R-It’s a waste of bloody time and money.
Now tell me what your experience of that is.
R-Oh well, we’d only one experience of that and that was at Dobson’s Dairy here in Barlick. {Coates Mill] Dobson’s Dairies, a little Hick Hargreaves compound. And they decided that they wanted it bleeding, they’d read these technical books or some technical bloke had been talking to these bosses and they wanted this engine bleeding and could we please take the steam from the low pressure after it finished in there and put it round the processing plant where they made the dried feed for cattle. So these drawings came from somewhere. So we did all this job and it cost a fortune. Altered all these pipes, disconnected them from the condenser, took it all round, about 8” pipe all down to this processing plant. Put all new slide valves in, specially made ones that ‘ud fit under the engine and then we get it going one Saturday morning. And they tried and of course I came out because I knew it ‘ud be no damned good. You’d no vacuum, we’d only be drawing about ten inches of vacuum on the vacuum gauge when it were pulling back from the milk preparation plant. The engine were struggling away and the corliss gear on the high pressure cylinder were all open about twice as wide as it ever had done before and of course that’s coal going up your boiler flue! About twice as much. Anyhow, I left it at that but on the Sunday they came down for me, would I go up there and have a look at it. And what had happened, they’d got a bit wrong with all these valves, these slide valves, and they’d got one open and the other one shut. The air pump drew all the milk out of the preparation plant and it got into the boiler feed and filled the bloody boiler! When I got there the boiler were full of milk up to the junction valve! He he he! You never saw such a mess in all your life, every bloody thing were dried milk crust. So I suggested they did away with the plant for making cattle food, they could make it in the boiler no bother! We couldn’t get the manhole lid in at the bottom, we’d to knock it in wi’ a bloody tup! He he he he! Aye we had that, there were two feet of dried milk in the bottom of the boiler, you’ve never seen owt like it in your life. High and low water valve float were about two foot thick! It took us two days to get that lot cleared out. So that was the end of that, they never used it any more. Them valves were shut, the hand wheels taken off and they never used it any more. The fireman told me he’d burned about ten ton more coal in two days than what he’d been burning before and he was burning plenty before.
Aye, he’d be making steam for process and all.
R-He were making steam for the engine which were taking twice as much steam to run the place and it had a fair lot of load on at the time. They never used it any more. They talk about bleeding these Bellis and Morcombe’s you know, there’s a lot of it done. They run this exhaust steam from between the high and the low through calorifiers for heating water or a bit of steam heating or something like that but Belliss’s only recommend taking about two or three pounds you know. So you might as well not bother because it’s no damn good unless you only want the water aired.
It ‘ud be all right off a turbine wouldn’t it?
R-Oh, that’s a different job altogether because a turbine’s only a casing full of steam when all’s said and done isn’t it. It’s only blowing a fan round so it’s a different thing altogether. And even so, and I’m not a turbine man, and I’m not reckoning to be, buy I should still think you’d be better off with using your vacuum than what you are breaking it to borrow steam. The more vacuum you have the more efficient you’re running because that’s the bit God gives you for nowt is your vacuum.
Yes, that’s it. There’s another thing while we’re tidying these little odds and sods up. There’s been a lot of weird and wonderful ideas about heating sheds and one thing that always struck me about Bancroft, and it had it in common with just about every Lancashire loom shop that were ever built, they always put the heating pipes up under the bloody roof heating up the sparrows instead of the shed!
R-Aye, well they all did that.
I mean it were obvious that it were difficult to get them down on the floor but even so there were some weird and wonderful ideas about reducing pressures and all the rest of it weren’t there?
R-Oh yes, there were that. Well, this big mill here that were sat across the way from, that were a good example.
Wellhouse.
R-Aye. They dropped a …., we had to put a reducing valve in. This were in like my young days when I helped to put this reducing valve in. They were 130 pound pressure boilers and 130 pound went round the shed. So they had this idea, one thing and another, that if we reduced the pressure going out into the mill it’d save them some coal. So we put this blooming great reducing valve in between the boilers and the distribution centre for the mill and it reduced everything. Heating, tapes, the lot. There were six tapes at Wellhouse, seven I think at one time. So Billy Watson says to me, I don’t know Newton, I’m having nowt to do with it, it isn’t my idea. Well, I says, because he were a good bloke were that because it was him that taught me all I knew about engines when I were a lad. He said It isn’t my idea and I can’t see how it’s going to do any good. Well I said, You’ll just have to wait and see won’t you when winter comes. So along comes winter, and it was a pretty hard winter. Well, after t’first two or three mornings of frost and t’firemen being there all night trying to keep the shop warm they all went out on strike. So they’d been on strike one day and they came back one day if I remember correctly. They went back Thursday and Friday morning but they were on strike while dinnertime. Me father came to me and says Can you and Bob take that reducing valve out and make a bobbin to go in, because the pipes had been shortened for this reducer. Oh I says, I think we could. He says All the others are busy. So we went and we took this valve out and Billy Watson says to me, Hey, don’t let’s do it like it was before, let’s couple it to t’superheaters, let’s warm ‘em up reight. They were superheat steam but it were only low pressure superheat, Swansea Superheaters which never got a big temperature. So what we did, we put this bobbin in wi’ a ‘T’ piece in’t middle and we coupled it wi’ a two inch pipe to the nearest connection we could get to which were superheat steam. And after that they never looked behind ‘em any more, they were never out on strike again because of the cold. But after the war, wi’ one thing another, th’insurance made them take that pipe out. But they never put the reducing valve in again, not in Wellhouse. They let ‘em put 130 pound round the mill.
I once heard someone say that there were an insurance regulation somewhere about the pressure you were allowed to put through plain pipe runs. I mean, if you read the text books, I mean, at Bancroft we had some runs there that were two or three thousand foot of two inch pipe just on one run. And in theory, it was going to hammer them pipes to buggery when you put the steam in ‘em in a morning. But do you know, you could put steam in them pipes on the coldest morning, as long as you just cracked it for about five minutes [With all the bypass pipes open round the steam traps.] and then you could put 160pound on them pipes while it was still cold water coming back through the drains for about another five or ten minutes. [As soon as the by pass pipes got hot with steam blowing through you closed them and let the traps take care of the condensate.]
R-And there wouldn’t be any trouble at all.
All you got in the shed were a little …
R-A little bit of ticking.
Yes, and it didn’t bang.
R-You could hear the water going out and they’d just go tick with the expansion in the brackets that was all. You didn’t get water hammer like these people talk about, these technical people.
No, they talk about it as though it’s the end of the world don’t they.
R-But now then. This cropped up many a time, like you said, you’d open it, just crack it for five minutes. Now there’s your answer. Now you’d get these people that’d just go in and open that valve wide open. You’d get water hammer then and it’s damned dangerous. What happens there is that your pipes are half full of water and your steam goes over the top and you’ve got hot steam and cold water and it causes turbulence and it can bang and crack. In fact, cast iron pipes, it’ll split ‘em. Now what you said about cracking that valve for five or ten minutes, get those first lengths all hot and the water was going forward. Now, further down that pipe they’d be full, steam behind ‘em and they were full because it’d force the half of the pipe full of water forwards and fill the others up. And like you say, cold water was coming out the other end and there wasn’t a muff. That was the answer, crack them open for ten minutes.
If it were freezing cold, in fact whenever I put the heat on, what I used to do was crack it for, well happen not five or ten minutes, not for so long just two or three minutes until I thought it were reight and then I’d quietly wind the valve open [Putting boiler pressure on to the manifold.] and then I’d go and sit on the drains and I used to have me hand on them, I knew which one came through first, and I used to sit there with me hand on the bypass pipe and if it were a cold morning that water was freezing.
R-It were freezing cold.
It used to numb your hand.
R-Aye, I’ve done it, I’ve sat in the same place and waited for them pipes to blow through.
And as soon as it comes warm, shut the bypass on the trap.
R-I’ve done just the same thing and I’ve never had any trouble. Anywhere I went I’ve never had any trouble. But yet you used to read these articles in these insurance books about pipes splitting wi’ water hammer and I could never understand it. They must have walked straight in and opened the four inch valve wide open. Well, you can expect water hammer, nothing’l stand it. Just banged it open. So what they did they made ‘em put reducing valves in and drop it down to sixty but that didn’t stop the water hammer, reducing it to sixty, all it did were take some of the risk out of it that’s all.
Anyway, wi’ steam pipe, I’m not talking about cast iron steam pipe which they used to be I know, but wi’ steam pipe for heating, if you had any trouble at all it were erosion on the bends and you’d get a pin hole blowing.
R-That’s all or a little seam split, there’d only be a bit of a fizzle.
Yes, there’s only one thing Newton, I could never understand about pipe fitters when they were putting these systems in, why the hell didn’t they put a union in every now and again!
R-Aye, they’d go all round the bloody shed and not put a union in! And if you had a repair job the first thing you’d to do was saw it in two! When I used to do a shed job like that, if it were a new job like, I used to put one pipe down and join every other, every alley length, with a union into that. I had a common feed and joined every one in [with a tee and a union] First time we ever did a job like that me father said it wouldn’t work and he frightened me to death. He says It won’t work won’t this, what you doing. I says Of course it’ll work. He said It won’t, steam’ll just whistle down your common feed, it’ll not go round, it’ll not start going down one and up another. I said Well, it does in a radiator! He says Well this isn’t a bloody radiator. I says Of course it is, a lot bigger, that’s all. And it worked and we did loads like that and you get a lot more heat because every pipes fed off live steam. Each section of your shed’s fed off live steam. Make it into a ‘U’. It’s funny on a tape recorder, you want a bloody picture so’s you can draw it! You know what I mean don’t you, I did Camerons like that.
Yes, because the nearer too the drain the cooler your pipes are.
R-Of course they are. Well if you have a main feed they’re all the same temperature. You get lots of places where down on’t canal side half the weavers’ll be roasting and at bottom end of the shed they’d be going home on strike! Albert Mills at Nelson were a good instance of that. So I put a common two inch main down one side and broke into all the pipes and made them into squares. Into happen six sections all feeding out of the one main, one two inch main and a two inch valve in the boiler house feeding it. No more trouble, no more trouble at all, no more strikes and nobody in bother. You see what he could do and all, if you put him a valve in at each pipe end, for each section, he could send his oiler in to shut that and leave the cold end on. Whereas if one end of the shed were hot, in lots of cases they’d just knock it down in the boiler house and then t’bottom end, up to the outside wall’d be freezing until dinnertime. They’d have to put it all on again.
Yes, well, we had three ranges in at Bancroft shed.
R-Aye well, that’d been altered then you know.
And many a time I’d leave the back one on.
R-Aye, sheds that were built into a hillside, in’t country, were especially bothered wi’ that.
Yes. And another thing that were talking about there, about a two inch pipe taking plenty of steam into the shed. People won’t believe that but wasn’t there something you once told me and I can’t believe it, that if you drill a half inch hole in a Lancashire boiler….
R-It won’t keep steam up. No, if you put a half inch pipe into a Lancashire boiler and poke it through the roof it won’t keep steam up.
Aye, now people won’t understand that.
They won’t, and what they’ll say is how can that work if it’s an eight inch pipe going out to the engine. He he he! I say, you try it and see, put a three quarters hole in the boiler and tap it for half inch pipe and see if you can keep steam up. I didn’t believe me father when he told me about that but it’s true.
SCG/26 November 2000
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