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Subject: shot tower From: john f weldon Date: 22 Feb 09 - 09:30 AM (I think this counts as musical, but am willing to be over-ruled) These are pictures of Montreal's shot tower... shot tower ...my wife took the pix after we heard a song about it by "The United Steel Workers of Montreal" on Gerry Goodfriend's "Folk Directions" radio show. The show is archived here: http://www.ckutfolk.com/html/listen.html ...the most recent Feb 19th I believe for an interview & song. Thought folks might find the audio-visual combo interesting. |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: bobad Date: 22 Feb 09 - 10:12 AM Thanks for that John, it's pretty cool and I learned something new today. |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: katlaughing Date: 22 Feb 09 - 11:45 AM That seems like an inefficient way of making lead balls. I guess I never thought about any "mass" production of them, having only read of people who made their own. Thanks for the education! It must have been terrible work. |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: topical tom Date: 22 Feb 09 - 12:08 PM Fascinating! I'd never heard of this before.What a primitive-sounding process, no doubt involving hard work along the way. |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: john f weldon Date: 22 Feb 09 - 12:35 PM ...hard work and massive neurolgical damage, which they knew about. Still, having heard about all the guys who blew themselves up with blasting powder while digging the Lachine Canal, or got the "bends" while working on the Victoria bridge... ...I'm kinda glad I spent my life staring into a light bulb and scribbling with a pencil. These days, of course, you can get a surprisingly high salary driving a truck... ...in Iraq. |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: JohnInKansas Date: 22 Feb 09 - 01:40 PM More modern shot towers were used, at least until lead shot was banned for bird hunting in the US. It's actually one of the most efficient ways of making "little round things" in very large quantities, and it supposedly is surprisingly simple to select a specific "drop" size and make the shot very consistently nearly all of the same selected size. Newer ones of course had all kinds of "isolation areas" and air filters and fume traps and the like to reduce the rate at which the operators had to be replaced. The tower had to be tall enough for the lead bits to harden before hitting a pool of water at the bottom, so that the impact with the water wouldn't flatten them. A liquid drop falling through air can be something rather non-spherical, so some towers had features that attempted to make the air flow inside the tower approximately match the drop velocity, at least down to where the shot "firmed up some." The falling shot itself will entrain enough air to set up an approximately ideal air flow if the top of the tower is "leaky enough," but if done by accident as in the older towers that can (especially with lead) just spread the contamination around the whole neighborhood. Without some air flow, the air heats up and it takes longer for the balls to harden (and either a taller tower is needed, or "shorter runs" must be made). A similar method, with much more complex machinery of course, has been used to make small steel balls for ball bearings, although I don't believe anyone is still doing it with towers in that trade. John |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: JohnInKansas Date: 22 Feb 09 - 01:45 PM kat - You're thinking of lead balls, as used by muzzle loaders; and those were always cast in molds so far as I've heard. The towers were used only for "shot" (as in shotgun) up to about BB size and mostly smaller. John |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: GUEST,.gargoyle Date: 22 Feb 09 - 04:56 PM
FROM BRISTOL HISTORY PAGE
Legend has it that William Watts, a local plumber, had a dream about molten lead falling from the sky and producing perfectly round spheres (shot) as it did so. (This is the story I read in a history of iindustry book as a kid)
http://members.lycos.co.uk/brisray/bristol/blead1.htm
FROM TRAPHOF
Watt's old house -- his original shot tower -- kept producing shot until 1968.
Watt's invention teaches us the two essential elements of good invention. The first is perception. Watts gazed more closely at nature and saw what other people had missed. The other element is simplicity. Others had labored to control the process with their own hands. Watts had the grace to stand aside and let nature do the work for him. The real beauty of this process is that, in the end, there is no human process at all.
(This is a poem (NOT Lyrics) so don't think it gives wings to this oh, too leaden thread - that does not belong in the "Upper Kingdom."
John Dix, who was enjoying some notoriety as a surgeon, writer of bad poetry and an alcoholic, penned these words...
So that only himself could make Patent Shot, And King George and his son declared they'd not Shoot with anything else—and they ordered a lot. The Regent swore that the smallest spot In a small bird's eye he'd surely dot: And every sportsman, both sober and sot, From the peer in his hail to the hind in his cot, Vowed that they cared not a single jot, When the game was strong and the chase was hot, For anything else than the Patent Shot.
http://www.traphof.org/shot-towers-2/shot-towers-page-1.htm
Sincerely,
It is a truely - VERY efficent way of producing shot. I tried it as a kid but the house roof was too low, the sieve too small and cold, the heat source too far removed from the roof and the seive quickly gummed up with the molten lead from wheel-balancing-weights (which are much better suited for casting deep-sea-fishing-weights using a broomstick end in garden-soil with a coat-hanger loop for attachment) |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: katlaughing Date: 22 Feb 09 - 07:04 PM Yes, John, I was. Thanks for the clarification. |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: JohnInKansas Date: 22 Feb 09 - 07:51 PM The next step in the process, actually used to make bearing balls, and claimed and probably applicable if you really want spherical shot - which "flies straighter," is to roll the shot between rotating steel plates. A few modern shot makers reported use of this process, and had very proprietary (and sometimes colorful) names to distinguish their shot from that merely "whipped in shape by the wind": Picture two circular flat plates laying flat with one above the other, the top plate having a hole in the center but with the centers of the two slightly displaced. When an "almost round" bunch of objects is poured into the hole, with the plates rotating, the plates are of course pushed apart by the diameter of the larger objects. As the plates rotate, they "squash the big chunks" until they contact all of the chunks, and the chunks roll along between the plates. Because of the circular path, and the displacement between the axes of the plates, the "chunks" are "spun" as they roll, so that they come out sperical rather than as cylinders. The amount of displacement between the axis of the upper plate and that of the lower plate determines how rapidly the "chunks" migrate to the outer rim of the plates and fall out - by then being "perfectly round" and all (at least statistically) of precisely identical size. Some of the modern shotmakers have touted that the rolling process also "microforges and hardens" the shot. It's somewhat questionable whether forge-hardening lead is of real benefit for lead shot, since it "self anneals" rather rapidly; but it is a very real and important factor in the quality of ball bearings - and the ad department has to claim every benefit they can imagine, since someone might believe them. John |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: Kent Davis Date: 23 Feb 09 - 12:26 AM There is a shot tower visible from Interstate 77, just a few miles from where it splits from Interstate 81 near Wytheville, Virginia. It was built around 1807. It is 75 feet high, but there is a well inside going down another 75 feet, so the molten lead actually fell 150 feet. It adjoins New River Trail State Park. http://www.dcr.virginia.gov/state_parks/shottowr.shtml Kent |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: Gurney Date: 23 Feb 09 - 01:01 AM Must have been good fun shovelling the shot out, up to your backside in water. Or maybe they drained the water (pollution?) and had a swag of buckets in there. There must have been a screening process as well, to ensure that the shot were the same size as each other. When I was a freshwater angler in England, the split-shot we used for weights were carefully organised so that each shot was twice the weight of the last one. I can't remember them all, but they started at dust-shot, and there was No.4, No.8, BB, AA, and swan-shot. I seem to remember that BB shot was .177calibre, AA was .22calibre. |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: Joe Offer Date: 23 Feb 09 - 01:14 AM I spent two days walking Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay shore in connection with the Getaway last year. I was mostly in search of lighthouses, but one of the more interesting buildings I found in Baltimore was this shot tower (click), built in 1828. Apparently, the process forms near-perfect spheres of fairly uniform size. -Joe- |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: GUEST,leeneia Date: 23 Feb 09 - 10:26 AM Thanks for the link, Joe. That's interesting. When I see a structure like that or like an old lighthouse, I marvel. I picture myself as a worker in 1850 or so with nothing but a piece of ground, a few simple tools and a lot of bricks. And I'm supposed to produce a tall, slim, straight tower many feet high... How did they do it? |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: john f weldon Date: 23 Feb 09 - 11:18 AM Erik Von Danniken would have a theory, but.... By 1850, engineering was making huge leaps. It was the hottest thing going, and everyone was into making everything bigger, higher, longer! Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the engineer, (what a great name) was the hero of the day, and there's an old animated film about him called, simply, "BIG", which pretty much sums it up. |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: GUEST,Gern f. Date: 24 Feb 09 - 02:19 AM I think the part I found most intreguing about the the whole story about the shot tower that is located down the street from my house here in SW. Montreal was that the lads who worked there got extra and in some cases double the pay because you generally fell over and died from lead poisoning after about 8 or 10 years of working there. |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: rich-joy Date: 24 Feb 09 - 04:53 AM .... and The Antipodes sports this 157ft one (plenty of pics on the net) : Shot Tower in Tasmania, Australia (i.e. Van Dieman's Land) Situated on the Channel Highway is one of the State's most historic buildings, the Shot Tower. The Shot Tower is a 48m (157ft) tall, 10m (32ft) in diameter circular sandstone tower constructed by Joseph Moir in 1870 from locally quarried sandstone blocks. Lead shot was made by dropping molten lead through a sieve at the top of the tower and by the time it hit the water at the bottom it was cold and spherical in shape. A climb up 259 steps to the top of the tower gives a wonderful view of the Derwent Estuary. Also, Taroona was the childhood home of Tasmanian-born Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark ... plus : 1967 Bushfires In February 1967, southern Tasmania was engulfed in the most vicious wildfires on record, resulting in many deaths. Taroona was the closest suburb to the city of Hobart to take the full brunt of the fires, which swept across the suburb in the mid afternoon, wreaking havoc, and destroying many homes. Children and residents fled to the river, and many people's survival was due to the refuge the safe waters provided. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taroona,_Tasmania Cheers, R-J (lovely place for a holiday, BTW) |
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Subject: RE: shot tower From: Bill S from Adelaide Date: 24 Feb 09 - 05:37 AM Or go to Melbourne Central which is a shopping centre built around the old shot tower BS |
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