STEAM ENGINES AND WATERWHEELS

[Stanley]

During the course of the routine maintenance other jobs cropped up, some were improvements, others were rectifications of damaged items, usually caused by corrosion and old age.
One of the improvements was the replacing of the small rope drives which drove the recirculation pumps on the four largest bearings, those on the flywheel shaft and the second motion shaft. I had watched Kenyon's rope splicers making three new driving ropes for the governor which were original and were slipping slightly affecting the accuracy of the governor and decided I could splice my own for the lubricators. They had to be done in situ because you can't lift the shafts to slip a ready made rope on to them! It was far harder that I thought and it took me a few attempts to get a satisfactory result.
John and I improved the feed to the boiler beyond all recognition by installing an extra, very large capacity three ram feed pump running at slow speed. That was a big job. Newton's fitters actually installed the pump but John and I did everything else. The biggest physical task was carrying the concrete for the bed into the cellar in two gallon buckets. We were glad when that was done!
One of the elements essential to maintaining the boiler was to blow down a small quantity of water every morning before starting firing as during the night dissolved scale would settle at the front of the boiler under the still conditions and a small blast of the blow-down valve would get it out of the boiler. John did this early one morning and the external blow-down pipe fractured. He shut off and we carried on but during the day I robbed some redundant 4" pipe out of the system and when we stopped that night we replaced the corroded pipe with serviceable second hand pipe.



It took us about seven hours to complete the job and we earned our overtime!

There was an interesting sequel to this job. I was snoozing in my armchair the next day in the engine house when someone shook me to wake me up. I opened my eyes and there was our Mr Birtles the managing director. He wasn’t a happy bunny, he had found both me and John asleep in our chairs and told me in no uncertain terms that he didn’t pay us for sleeping. I asked him to have a look at the pressure gauge and tell me what we were running at. He reported 140psi on the button. I said that in that case he shouldn’t worry about the firebeater because as long as he was asleep he wasn’t burning coal. The engine was plonking away smoothly at 69rpm and I knew that the weavers were having a good day because it wasn’t long before I had been for a walk round. As for me being asleep, he knew fine that the least variation in the engine would get me on my feet. I pointed out that what he didn’t know, because we hadn’t made a song and dance about it, was that John and I had been working until 2am that day repairing a burst blow down main. I think he got the message, he went away and left us alone.

[Stanley]

In many ways, engine maintenance was a minor activity once everything was adjusted and a good routine set in place. The key to that was good lubrication intelligently applied, regular testing of the boiler water and most of all a good relationship with my firebeater. I have commented many times on what a joy it was working with John Plummer. We treated each other as equals, shared the graft and never had a wrong word. I've never had a better co-worker, we were definitely a team.
Where this was most valuable was if there was some sort of urgent call from another part of the mill because something had gone wrong. I could trust John, once the boiler was settled down, to take over monitoring the oils in the engine house while I went to deal with whatever came up. In effect I was responsible for the whole of the mechanical side of the mill and the pipework, this included general maintenance of course.
During the very hot summer of 1976 I was called into the shed one day to investigate a funny noise. I found that 3 of the cross shafts in the transmission had expanded so much they were rubbing on the wall beyond the tail bearing. It must have been hotter in there than at any time since 1920 when the mill commenced, they had never rubbed before. I decided that they were safe and we ran until going home time and then John and I went into the shed and spent an interesting couple of hours sawing an inch of the ends of the shafting. It tapered as it crossed the shed and was 2" diameter at that end. When you got up a ladder it was over 100F and we were both glad when we got the job done!



Here you get an idea of the length of the shafts.
Another consequence of the hot weather was that the timber framing supporting the armoured glass that formed the roof of the Ladies lavatory shrank and there was a danger of the heavy metal frames falling in. I had to do this repair while the mill was running and was very aware of my weavers using the facilities. In the end Phyliss told me that I wouldn't see anything I hadn't seen before so "Get on with it Lad!". My education progressed a lot that day......
Blockage of sewer pipes was a problem when paper knickers were in vogue..... I was glad when the fashion died out!
One day I heard a commotion in the warehouse and when I went to investigate I found that one strand in the single rope that conveyed power to the plaiting machines in the warehouse from the shed shafting had failed in that one strand had broken and it was flailing about filling the place with dust. Nobody had called me, they were all stood about watching what was a very dangerous situation. I sent John to tell the tapers to start the donkey engine as I was going to have to stop the mill. I made everyone get out of the way and when the donkey had started I stopped the mill and cut the rope out. That meant some overtime fitting the two plaiting machines with individual electric motors which I had in stock, cheaper than installing a new rope.



A plaiting frame, there were two of them. Never a dull moment!

[Spinningweb]

On this engineers report I have from the Pilot Mill, Bury in 1945, on the left page shows used oils, and oils in stock, one which I noticed was Castor Oil, reading about its properties is ideal as a high temperature lubricant. The Castrol Company took its name from Castor Oil.

Engineers Report.JPG

[Stanley]

In the days before refined mineral oils Castor Oil was very valuable. The last use I saw in engines was in speedway bikes which had a dry sump JAP engine and a constant loss system. The Distinctive smell of Castrol Oil 'R' still brings back memories of Belle Vue. The Name 'Castrol' derives from the oil. Another use of it was in very large slow speed bearings that were under heavy load. There were dried castor oil streams on the pedestals of the Ellenroad engine where it had leaked into the beds. These never dry out completely but become very viscous. At Ellenroad we re-concreted part of the floor at the base of one of the pedestals and three months later I noticed that the oil had flowed onto the new concrete so it is still moving.
At Bancroft I realised that George Bleasdale had been economising on oil, he was using 'core oil' in the cylinders. This was not lubricating oil at all but an oil used in making cores for patterns in foundry work. It's main characteristic is that when baked in high heat it solidifies and binds the cores. Exactly what you don't need in a steam cylinder!
The old engineers used to say there were only two types of oil, thick and thin. In many ways they were right but in later days the science of lubrication, Tribology, was developed and today you can get oils formulated for almost any duty, some elements of which are synthetic. Specialised steam cylinder oil manufacturers were thin on the ground in the 1970s so I went digging. I found that a firm called Walker's Century Oils supplied all of the NCB's needs and they were still running steam winding engines so I contacted them. Best thing I ever did! They sent an expert up and he gave me the idiot's guide to cylinder oils. Basically there are two types, one for wet saturated steam like Bancroft and one for dry superheat steam. I remembered Newton telling me that most of the troubles with superheat engines were down to the fact that they used the wrong oil on them.
I persuaded the management to let me change to Walker's oils and at first they cavilled about the expense but I told them to watch the performance figures....., The new oil cleaned up the old core oil from the bores, I could tell that because where it leaked out of the stuffing boxes it dissolved the old oil deposits on the outside. I never had any problems with lubrication from then on.
When I took over Ellenroad engine I found that Walker's no longer made the oil but they gave the composition data to Total who owned the site by then and they made up a large batch for me which kept us going until I left. Total used the request as part of their advertising and distributed a big article about the engine to their customers to let them know they could lubricate any application.
The best oil for all other purposes on the engine was a straight SAE 40 mineral oil with no additives.



The Kirkham HP cylinder lubricator. As you can see in the sight glass on the right there is a drop of clear oil travelling up the guide wire in the sight glass through the distilled water it is filled with. This supply is under greater than boiler pressure, about 180psi in this case.
One other interesting fact I picked up during my investigations was that old fashioned clock oil was another natural oil, Neat's Foot Oil, which is extracted from ground up animal hooves. The way it was refined was to put it in clear glass bottles and leave it exposed to daylight for a year, this precipitates impurities out and clean oil can be decanted from the bottle. The very best clock oils went though this process three times and this is why it was so expensive. It is also the reason why the oil should be kept in dark glass bottles out of direct light because the refining process will continue indefinitely. Now there's a little known fact for you!

[PanBiker]

Every garage forecourt used to have a portable Castrol R pump as additive for fuelling two stroke engines. One shot to a tank of 2 star leaded on a Bantam and other marques from memory, similar for all the scooter boys.

[Stanley]

I remember them well Ian, very popular in racing car engines as well.
One thing we were very careful about was disposal of the waste oil after we had used it. There was a gutter all round the engine beds and I kept it full of soft waste from the tapes. I used to roll it into a loose rope and about every 4 months or so took it out and stored it in barrels. We kept some in hand for fire lighting but burnt the rest in the furnaces when we had a good fire on so it went into making steam.
The oil injected into the cylinders emulsified with the steam and eventually found its way into the dam where I suspect a biological process ate away at it. We never had oil floating on the surface and it never affected the ducks and moor-hens that populated the dam. Some mill lodges had carp in them but I never saw a fish in ours. There was no evidence of oil in the silt.
One waste product we produced on a daily basis was ash and clinker from the boiler, on good coal, over the year, an average of about two barrow loads a day plus the finer fly ash from the flues which as brought out on the three flueing days a year, we kept that separate. If you read the minutes of the Calf Hall Shed Company you'll find that they sold their ash and clinker, the council was a regular customer. It was a valuable material for constructing paths. The fly ash was the best material for making a bed for laying flags as it's sharp edges ensured that once in place they never moved. Another use was in the making of lime and clinker mortar for house building. Almost every mill had a mortar mill outside driven by a short extension from the end of the main fly shaft and local builders used them to make grey mortar which was the standard compo well into the 20th century cement came into fashion. It had the great advantage that once made it could be stored and knocked up again for many days as long as it was kept wet.
In my time there was no commercial market for clinker and fly ash but it had long been the practice to allow anyone to take it away free and this meant that we never had to worry about disposal. The heaps quietly melted away as fast as we made them. I think that every allotment path in Barlick is made with clinker!



Dr Arthur Morrison from Thornton in Craven cleaning up for us in 1978!

[Bodger]

Stanley , a bit of a digression on your working life, as a commercial driver did you acquire rope tying by observation or instruction, today with ratchet straps & curtain sides roping loads is a lost art i was always fascinated how they could shorten ropes by tying loops and knots, i spent time after unloading helping to fold "tarps", every driver seemed to have his own collection of rope, bits of wood, and various odd & sods that he used whilst driving.

[Big Kev]

Stanley , a bit of a digression on your working life, as a commercial driver did you acquire rope tying by observation or instruction, today with ratchet straps & curtain sides roping loads is a lost art i was always fascinated how they could shorten ropes by tying loops and knots, i spent time after unloading helping to fold "tarps", every driver seemed to have his own collection of rope, bits of wood, and various odd & sods that he used whilst driving.

My dad taught me the art of tying 'dollies', a very useful skill for a while.

[Stanley]

I always called those knots Dollies as well Kev, I think they got the name because they look like a corn dolly when they are tied correctly.
You're right Bodge, roping and sheeting is a lost art. No such thing as instruction for me, I just picked it up as I metamorphosed into general haulage when our other work for the dairy dried up. A well loaded cargo sheeted up like a parcel and properly roped down was the signature of a good driver. I can't remember when I last saw one.
The bits of dunnage you carried round were essential for some loads. The handiest of them all were 3" square battens of hardwood used as spacers or in some cases chocks. Things like steel coils or paper reels which could be equally dangerous had to be restrained. They made good ties for things like high loads of sawn timber and you soon learned to rope at half way up then battens, then the rest of the load. A good headboard used to be essential but you hardly ever see them today, best defence against a load sliding forwards under braking or a violent halt like a collision. Some of the fatal accidents I have seen were caused by that, the worst was steel plate sliding forwards and shearing the cab and the driver in two. Things like that made you sit up and take notice! The wagons that carried steel coils regularly out of South Wales used to have a depression in the middle of the flat. The coils were loaded gunshot and sat in the wells. A very good idea and reasonably safe. Later in my career I acquired two long chains with Stevenson lever fasteners to tighten them. Very good for some dangerous loads.
Gunshot and roll was the expression for the way you loaded anything that was long in relation to width. Gunshot was with the long axis parallel with the line of the flat, roll was with it across the bed. Very common with long bales of wool. Some loads were one-offs. Barrels broken down into their component parts and tied in a bundle with strong string were a good example. They call them shooks. When I hit that problem I had the sense to ask the old bloke who was helping me to load them at Briton Ferry. I could never have worked that one out!
As you got more experienced, nothing was a surprise and I never had a load slip but it took years......

[Stanley]

Bancroft Shed had a true North light roof. The principle was that all the windows in the saw tooth pattern roof faced North and so never got direct sunshine. This meant that the light in the shed never varied, it was always a neutral light and best for colours and fine work. The problem with this was that the blue slates facing them got maximum sun and reflected radiated heat through the glass raising the temperature of the shed in summer. The cure for this was to whitewash the shed roof windows in June to cut down on this heat. I used to get a gang together and we always did it early one June morning in good weather and it was a tedious but very pleasant job.



My usual gang was Ernie Roberts, Roy Wellock, John Plummer and me and it was a nice place to be.



Ernie, Roy and John having a break.

I made the whitewash very thin. It gave us the necessary cover but by the time we got to August it was beginning to wash off and whilst some mills had to have a second day on the roof cleaning the whitewash off with steel wool we never had to do that.
Another outside job was checking the trash screen on the entrance to the brick culvert that brought Gillian's Beck into the dam. It was a good idea to do this in late summer so that when the autumn rains came we didn't have a blockage and water running over the fields.



As you can see I didn't always get it right! This was in 1977.

[Stanley]

Here I am in the dam cleaning the bottom of the intake for the condenser water. This was part of my holiday maintenance which involved draining the dam and encouraging silt to go out through the clow. Not pollution, it was just silt that would have been carried by the beck if the dam hadn't been there. By doing this three times a year I kept silt levels down to a reasonable level without frightening the horses!



It was surprising how much silt the natural flow shifted if you left it for a few days. Imagine digging that channel out by hand! When running in high flow conditions in wet weather I often opened the clow to let the excess flow take some silt out while the engine was running. You had to keep a close eye on the level when you were doing this!
When we emptied the boiler three times a year at flueing time I used to refill it with main's water. Normal 'make-up' of losses during running was done from the hot well to which all the condensate and cooling water was directed so it was largely dam water but we were lucky, it wasn't a bad analysis. It wasn't until the mill closed that I found out that the mains water we used wasn't metered, it came directly from the sprinkler main which was free. Someone had used their head in 1920!

[Stanley]

Mention of the sprinkler main brings me to another area of maintenance. I was the Responsible Person charged with inspecting and testing the sprinkler system in the mill at least once a week. In practice this was on Saturday morning. We were lucky at Bancroft in that there was enough pressure on the main from Whitemoor to give adequate pressure even in the upper storeys without the need for any auxiliary pumps. The whole mill was served by sprinkler heads.



Here's a spare head, we always had a few in stock. It has a valve in it held shut by a glass capsule containing a volatile fluid which, when it expanded under high temperature, burst and allowed the water to flow, hitting the serrated petticoat and producing a fine, very wetting spray. This type of head activated at 155F, 68C. There was another type of head that was used in high temperature locations, instead of the glass capsule it had a wing of low temperature melting alloy. I don't know what the trigger point was for those.



Here's the control valve for the system located in the warehouse. The large valve is a stop valve for use in any situation where you had to take pressure off the main. There was also a drain valve, the smaller one at the top. This was used to test the system. If you opened this valve it started a flow in the intake pipe and this activated a heavy cast iron gong on the wall outside the mill which gave an audible warning that the system was active. That was the test, open that valve and see if the gong sounded. Both these valves had locks on them to ensure they could not be accidentally operated.
We only ever had one small fire in my time. It was caused by a rocker rod at the base of a loom rubbing on the concrete and generating enough heat to fire the waste on the floor. Someone hit one of the fire alarm buttons and this activated an alarm in the engine house. The fire was quickly put out by a teapot full of water but the point of this story is against me. What I should have done was stop the engine immediately and instruct the office to call the fire brigade. To my shame, what I actually did was cancel the alarm, get a spare glass and the key to open the alarm case and go into the shed muttering imprecations about careless people breaking glasses with the pike on the end of a beam or roller, something that had happened previously. As soon as I got into the shed I realised there was smoke but no fire. Then I saw my mate Billy Two Rivers stood holding the hammer and about to break the glass on the larger Engine Stop Button.



These were strategically located in the shed and in theory when broken they activated the automatic stop motion built into the governor linkage which broke the connection between the governor and the valves and stopped the engine.



The alloy box with the electrical lead to it is the stop motion. It controlled a hammer that was held up by an electro magnet activated by the low voltage in the system. It was fail safe in that any interruption of this current, either through power cut or breaking the circuit with the stop button dropped the hammer, knocked out a peg in the governor rod and closed the steam valves. There was only one problem with this system, it didn't work and I had never been able to cure it! Billy said 'Should I hit it?" I told him no because I had no spare glasses for them, they were larger. I didn't tell him it wouldn't work! Pity because he told me afterwards he had always wanted to stop the engine!
The fire was out, I replaced the alarm glass and reactivated the system and entered the event up in the register. All was well but I knew that whilst everyone had acted sensibly and done the right thing it could have been a disaster and I would have been to blame. I made a mental note, had another go at making the stop motion work, failed again and put it all down to experience! It just goes to show that all those precautions and planning were useless when overridden by plain stupidity! Guilty as charged m'lud!

[Spinningweb]

I’ve seen several of these emergency stop buttons during mill demolitions, this one was pictured at the Bamber Bridge Spinning Mill at Preston in 2013, manufactured by James Tate & Co, Bradford. During my photo shoot I must have walked around this mill many times before I spotted this, including another one on a floor below, they were placed central on the former spinning floors. To open the switch you needed a Rittal key.

44.JPG

[Big Kev]

Bancroft Shed had a true North light roof. The principle was that all the windows in the saw tooth pattern roof faced North and so never got direct sunshine. This meant that the light in the shed never varied, it was always a neutral light and best for colours and fine work. The problem with this was that the blue slates facing them got maximum sun and reflected radiated heat through the glass raising the temperature of the shed in summer. The cure for this was to whitewash the shed roof windows in June to cut down on this heat. I used to get a gang together and we always did it early one June morning in good weather and it was a tedious but very pleasant job.



My usual gang was Ernie Roberts, Roy Wellock, John Plummer and me and it was a nice place to be.



Ernie, Roy and John having a break.

I made the whitewash very thin. It gave us the necessary cover but by the time we got to August it was beginning to wash off and whilst some mills had to have a second day on the roof cleaning the whitewash off with steel wool we never had to do that.
Another outside job was checking the trash screen on the entrance to the brick culvert that brought Gillian's Beck into the dam. It was a good idea to do this in late summer so that when the autumn rains came we didn't have a blockage and water running over the fields.



As you can see I didn't always get it right! This was in 1977.

North lights bring back memories, I was installing these back in the 1980s. I've had a varied career.

[Stanley]

Tate's motion was very popular at one time and worked by closing the main steam stop valve by a powerful spring fitted on the valve wheel that you wound up every time you opened the valve. There was a peg on the front you could knock out to activate the motion manually but the trigger was again electrical. If the circuit was broken anywhere in the mill it activated the gear so it was fail safe. There was an older version of this which worked by a heavy weight being released and on dropping the wire it was connected to the valve by wound the valve shut.



Here it is as fitted to the Jubilee engine at Padiham.

The stop motion on Bancroft was the most modern I have ever seen until I installed my own version at Ellenroad as part of the automated safety system I fitted. This was an electrically operated stop valve fitted in the 6" pipe to the high pressure cylinders which was triggered if any of the sensors I had installed showed the engine operating outside set parameters. As far as I know it has never been commissioned......

Another of my responsibilities was maintenance of all the lifting gear in the mill. Officially the gantry crane in the engine house was decommissioned but the chains still had to be annealed and tested once a year because they were old materials, modern lifting chains aren't subject to this regulation. I had to arrange the annual testing of the lift to the second storey but left that to a firm from Colne. The Teagle hoist used to lift beams in for the tapers was also in my charge and one year I had to order new ropes to be fitted to it. This was done by the professionals from Colne and after they had done it the Factory Inspector had to come and certify it. The day before he came I noticed that the fitters had slipped up and fitted the clamps on the wire rope at the end of the cat head the wrong way round. I had to reverse them before he came and the only way to get at them was by a forty foot ladder reared against the cat head by the men from Briggs and Duxbury's who lent me the ladder.
If you've never climbed a free standing 40ft ladder my advice is don't! If you are climbing a chimney you have solid ladders and brickwork 18" from your face. This ladder bent and swayed and all I could see through the rungs was Pen Y Gent 30 miles away. I have never been more frightened in my life! When I got down I was shaking and everyone agreed that they would never do it.



It doesn't look all that high but.........

[Stanley]

With the benefit of Newton's expert guidance I learned quickly and gradually bottomed the adjustment and maintenance of the engine and plant. In fact later on Newton told me that with a bit more time he reckoned he could make me into a tenter! The nicest thing he ever said to me. He really enjoyed popping up and listening to the engine purring away.
However, this didn't mean I was relaxing my vigilance. One of the things I learned very early on was that the best maintenance tool was your feet and eyes. I was forever watching the engine and when I had checked my oils I used to walk round the mill, calling in on everyone and getting feedback.
I was in the tape room one day when they started the donkey engine at dinnertime to keep the slashers running while the engine was stopped for the dinner break. There was a lot of play in the crosshead of the donkey and wear in one of the bearings on the small length of shaft that carried the big fast and loose pulley for engaging the donkey. I told the two tapers, Jim Nutter (Not one of the Nutter millions but related) and ? Gray that I'd get both attended to. Jim didn't think there was any need but I ignored him, he would have waited until something failed.



I had a word with Newton and he sent Jim and Bob Fort up to sort the bearing on the shaft and I did the crosshead on the engine myself. I fitted a plate on the bottom of the crosshead itself and took the play out of it. The engine ran far better but Jim told me it was worse it was too quiet! You can't win with some people.
On the whole I got on well with everyone, I was popular with the weavers because I had put their wages up by running the engine more smoothly and giving them better light by curing the long-standing fault on the alternator which meant it was delivering 50 volts less than it should. As I say, you can't please everyone and I'm afraid that Mr Greenwood, the man who ran the Barber Knotting Machine in warp preparation, who had never liked me, found himself faced with a machine that ran far faster and showed up all the faults that he had allowed to develop in it. Needless to say I was held responsible but Jim Pollard told me to ignore him, I had put his productivity up by 25% which suited Jim down to the ground.



The tape donkey engine. Two old mates of mine are watching it run and they helped me in the holidays to improve it, they were both old and very skilled fitters. They loved the chance to do a bit of good and taught me a lot while we were doing it. I've never been a big fan of re-inventing the wheel!

[Stanley]

So, the bottom line on maintenance is that it was as extensive as you cared to make it. There was plenty of scope in a 50 year old mill that had been starved of maintenance for years. My personal bete noire was the electric incinerator for sanitary products in the Lady's lavatory. It had been neglected for years and was disgusting..... I'll leave that to your imagination. I agitated with the management to employ modern disposal services but they never responded. The weavers knew what I was doing and appreciated it, it wasn't their preferred choice either!



One regular task springs to mind, making sure that the two clocks in the shed were keeping correct time. Their placement was a statutory requirement and historically management had a bad reputation for time cribbing, the practice of running the engine for longer that the statutory hours. I used to wind them and correct them every Saturday morning and always made sure they corresponded exactly with the electric clock in the engine house and I checked that daily with the Greenwich time signal. The weaver's memory was long and they remembered the bad old days. There was a bit of history behind this. At one time there were two 'official' times in Barlick, Railway Time and Post office time, there was a public clock at the Post Office and the station, both checked daily by the telegraph system. The weavers set their watches and clocks to Post office time and the engine house usually set their time by the Manchester Man giving them the corrections based on Railway Time. The problem was that there was always a difference between the two and as a consequence the Calf Hall Shed Company realised, after complaints, that the engine at Butts was starting earlier than Post Office Time. There is an entry in the minute books instructing the engineer to adhere to Post office time and also to desist from hitting the coal carter over the head with a shovel. There's a hidden story there! So I was always very careful on this matter.
The two clocks were lovely fusee movements and very high quality. I decided when the mill closed to bring them in the engine house for safe-keeping but when I went for them I was too late, some enterprising bugger had got there first and nicked them.

[Stanley]

Once you have a reputation as Mr Fixit you get some funny jobs. At one point the management decided that it would be cheaper to buy a secondhand van for transporting the weavers home each night instead of paying for Wild's bus. I was not consulted on the purchase but when it arrived the managing director asked me to look it over. It was well worn and I discovered that one reason why it was so cheap was that there was no oil in the final drive because the pinion bearing oils seal had failed. I reported it and surprise surprise, was told to fix it. I had given up vehicle maintenance long ago but bit the bullet, got a bearing and oil seal and fixed it. Big mistake.... a couple of months later our managing director turned up in his Morris Marina and informed me that the back spring was broken and would I please fix it. I was quicker and cheaper than a garage! So I did it.....
There were bigger and more important jobs. One such was the corrosion of the 6" diameter auger tube on the coal elevator in the boiler house. The quote for an outside firm was horrendous so I got on to Dixon's at Burnley and bought a second hand heavy 6" pipe from them which had been part of the heating system in a large oil tank. It had a slight bend in it and a ragged edge on each side where it had been welded into the tank.



I took it home to my shop at Hey Farm and totally refurbished the auger and hoppers. I enjoyed doing it, it was a dirt cheap repair and totally successful. Brownie points for Stanley.
One frequent occurrence in the shed was teeth breaking out of CI gears on the looms. Normally this was fine because the tacklers had a good stock of secondhand gears, they were all obsolete of course. Occasionally one broke and there was no replacement so the tacklers brought them to me and I put new teeth in them. The management expected me to do this as part of my job but I demurred. I said I'd do them as an outside contractor because I had my own little business at home maintaining wagons. They didn't fight over it and this was a good little earner and handy for the mill as I was cheaper than any of the normal channels. I soon got quite good at cobbling CI castings together with nickel rods. That's why I was able to repair Big kev's CI Morso stove for him.
In the course of running the engine you had to absorb a lot of information. One of them was a basic knowledge of combustion, burning coal isn't just a matter of chucking it into the furnace. This led to other jobs which strictly speaking were outside my remit. One of them was stoker maintenance.......

[Stanley]

The Proctor Unit Wide Coking Stoker on the Lancashire boiler at Bancroft.

Firing a boiler with coal is a very complicated job. Being dirty, the firebeater or stoker was never regarded as a skilled man but this was the biggest mistake you could make. A good firebeater had more effect on the economics of running a mill than any other factor. The old-fashioned and very efficient way of running a mill was to do a weekly audit of coal burned plus wages against cloth woven. This was a surprisingly accurate way of managing the enterprise if standing charges were included.
In the early days furnaces were fired handball, open the furnace door and shovel coal in. The fire rested on a bed of cast iron firebars about 6ft long and the trick was to maintain a bright fire evenly distributed over the grate. In order to do this you fired four down each side and three in the middle and shut the door immediately because the last thing you want is cold air cooling the furnace down, you want the draught to be coming up through the firebars from below promoting combustion.
When you do a firing the first thing that happens is that the green charge damps the brightness down and starts to produce volatiles, smoke to the layman. This has no heating effect and on a single flued boiler like a Cornish this means that until this gassing off has ceased and you have established a flame no heat is being transferred to the water. This is the genius of Fairbairn's twin flued Lancashire boiler and the reason why it became the standard. When the volatiles reach the downtake at the back of the boiler they are drawn down into the sole flue and meet the hot gas from the other fire which ignites them. This can be explosive and is the reason why a good setting had a mid-feather in the centre of the downtake, a firebrick wall that kept the gases separate until they reached the sole flue where explosions could do no damage. For this reason many call the downtake the explosion box and on some boilers like those at Ellenroad loose cast iron lids in the top allowed any sudden pressure to escape.
Burning coal at high temperature produces light ash, some of which is carried over the bridge at the back of the furnace and it's deposited as fly ash in the flues. This was why they had to be cleaned out three times a year. Any ash that wasn't carried over was fused by the high temperature into clinker which stayed on the firebars and eventually this blocked the ingress of draught from under the bars and lowered the temperature of the fire making the fire inefficient........ A bit of a problem for the firebeater!

[Stanley]

We have a fire that is being choked by clinker adhering to the firebars. The cure was to make sure your good fire was well charged and bright, another advantage of twin flues. Then open the firebox door and using one of your suite of long handled tools, turn what good fire there is on one half over to the other half. Then break the clinker up on the bars and rake it out onto the floor in front of the boiler. Turn the good fire over to the clean side and clear the clinker on that side. Then spread the hot coals, give a light firing and shut the door. Wait for that fire to stop gassing and get established and give it a full firing, four down each side and three down the middle. Then have a look at the other fire because it will need the same treatment. The faster this was done and the less the loss of steam pressure. A good firebeater didn't waste any time at all! On good coal burning about 5 tons a day in winter cleaning the fires would be done 3 or 4 times. On bad coal it could be hourly or even less! That's handball, lots more to it like managing feed water rate during cleaning to help maintain pressure but I haven't time to tell you everything!
The advent of mechanical stokers was a boon to the firebeater and the engineer as constant light firing gave more chance of constant steam pressure, the mark of a good firebeater. The first stokers still needed manual cleaning but the later ones had automatic systems. Let's have a look at the Proctor coking stokers we had at Bancroft, there were other types of course each with their own characteristics.
If you look back at our stokers you'll see bright fire showing through the holes in the narrow heavy CI doors. This is newly fired coal forced in by the rams of the stoker across the heavy CI coking plates at the front of the bed which, once the fire is established were red hot. This heated to green charge quickly and as the volatiles were driven off they were immediately converted to flame by the established fire further down the bed. Under ideal conditions and with good coal you could run a fire with no visible dark smoke.
But there is still the question of the clinker..... On each stoker there is a small electric motor driving two things via a variable speed gearbox. One is the rams on direct drive and the other is a camshaft across the front of the furnace which has lobes on it running in the shaped ends of the fire bars. These cams were so placed that the firebars were pushed forwards individually in a succession that ensured that the bar on either side was stationary. This action broke the grip of the clinker on the bars. When all the bars had been moved, the cams drew the whole bed of bars backwards and as the firebed had nowhere to go it stayed stationary. Then the cams pushed the whole bed forwards and the clinker that had piled up at the back of the bars was pushed over the end of the bed into an ashpit formed by a gap between the end of the bars and the firebrick half wall in the flue. This pit was closed by a half door made of heavy metal that stopped the draught being sucked into the pit but through the gaps in between the firebars.
To clean the clinker and ash from the pit you opened the half door and raked it out into a barrow strategically positioned at the end of the furnace tube and then closed the door again. Again the number of times this had to be done varied on the quality of the coal. On good coal we could get away with once a day in summer at closing time and twice in winter when we were of course burning more coal.
So when all was running well, all the firebeater had to do was ensure the coal hoppers were full and the water level and steam pressure correct. He could make adjustments to the weight and frequency of firing, the rate at which feed water was injected into the boiler and the amount of draught he had on the fire by adjusting the side flue dampers. Dead easy now you have read this. I'll see if I can disillusion you tomorrow!

[PanBiker]

Does the pipe coming down into the coal bunker have an auger mechanism in to draw the coal up into the chutes?

If so was this independently controlled by the firebeater?

[Spinningweb]

This is a similar worm screw type feed with an electric motor

41.JPG

[PanBiker]

So, I take it the answer is yes and assume the bottom of the pipe fed from its own bunker /hopper type arrangement that had to be filled by the firebeater. The photo shows it sitting in a big bunker but that would not automatically on its own feed coal to the bottom of the pipe is that right?

[Spinningweb]

Regarding my photo the worm screw pipe did feed the boiler from its own bunker and was still embedded in the remaining coal. Coal delivered was tipped on the boiler house floor, and had to be shovelled into the bunker.

[Stanley]

Sorry I'm late lads, I forgot to reply to this this morning. The pipe did indeed contain an auger and it was this pipe and the trunking over the top of the hoppers on the stoker that I renewed. The bottom of the auger sat on the floor in the bunker in front of the boiler into which we tipped coal deliveries. Because our bunker was so awkward at Bancroft we always had part of the load to shovel in after the delivery as the tipper couldn't get back far enough to deliver the whole load into the bunker but after we had shovelled the excess in this gave a good depth of coal over the foot of the auger which was a good thing for the firebeater because as long as it was buried, all he had to do was press the starter button and the auger delivered coal up into the splitter trunking above the hoppers. The trick was to stop the auger just as it jammed up because the hoppers and trunking were both full of coal.So equal quantities available to both boilers. As time went on of course the auger created a void and when that happened the firebeater had to help coal into the foot of the auger, When he judged that there was room for another load he told the engineer who rang the office and they ordered a six wheeler load off Dennison's at Bradford who carried for the NCB. Our normal coal was Brodsworth near Doncaster which closed in 1990. Before that happened we were switched on to open cast coal but that was equally good quality.



Occasionally, as with this load which was diverted to us from Rolls Royce, we got an eight wheeler and this gave us even more to shovel in but John and I were good men at handball and could manage it easily.



We always kept a stock of coal in the yard in case of pit strikes or other breakdowns in supply. We needed to keep the mill running! I used to borrow Alwin Simpson's tractor and fore end shovel to transfer coal from the stock to the bunker. Payment was in kind, I always delivered the tractor back with a full bucket of coal.