The trip continues ........ Sloss Furnaces

When we left Columbus, Georgia, and Fort Benning, we decided to stick to the smaller back roads instead of the freeways as we continued westbound.

Suzie has an App on her phone called Roadside America.  She checks this as we drive down the road and it tells her about interesting and quirky things to see nearby.  Here is a link to Roadside America.

Suzie kept following our trip on Roadside America and we ended up in Birmingham, Alabama to visit the Sloss Furnaces.  




Sloss Furnaces was a large pig iron manufacturing plant located in what is now downtown Birmingham.  The town of Birmingham was pretty much founded and built around this plant.

After the plant closed in 1971, it was eventually designated a National Historic Site in 1981 and has become the only preserved and restored blast furnace open to the public in the U.S.



They had a parking lot big enough for our motorhome and a very nice visitors center.  We went in and watched a 20 minute movie that tells you everything you will ever need to know about pig iron.

Pig iron is the intermediate product of smelting iron ore. It is the molten iron from the blast furnace, which is a large cylinder-shaped furnace charged with iron ore, coke, and limestone.





The traditional shape of the molds used for pig iron ingots was a branching structure formed in sand, with many individual ingots at right angles to a central channel or runner, resembling a litter of piglets being suckled by a sow. 

In this picture I got from the internet you can see the channel in the sand that the iron runs down from the blast furnace.  It is then diverted to the pigs where it cools into individual ingots.





When the metal had cooled and hardened, the smaller ingots (the pigs) were simply broken from the runner (the sow), hence the name pig iron.  

As pig iron is intended for remelting, the uneven size of the ingots and the inclusion of small amounts of sand caused only insignificant problems considering the ease of casting and handling them.

After we learned all of that at the movie, we went on a self guided tour of the plant.  This drawing shows the basic layout of the plant.

Air is brought into large compressors where it is compressed and then fed to the tall cylindrical blast furnace where it shoots onto the raw materials.  This heats and eventually melts them.  The molten metal is then let out of the bottom of the blast furnace and to the pigs.  The process never stops and new material is poured into the top of the furnace with conveyors as the metal is let out of the bottom.



When the plant was first started, they did not have conveyor belts to load the top of the furnace.  Instead, men would use wheelbarrows to walk the material up a ramp to the top of the furnace where other men would shovel it into the furnace.  

The temperature inside the furnace was somewhere between 1600º and 2300º so it must have been miserable putting in a 10 hour day at the top of the furnace shoveling iron ore.





As we began to enter the plant, we walked along the side of the casting shed.  That is where the pigs were actually cast.  More about it later.

We then arrived at the boilers and hot blast stoves.  The boilers powered the whole operation by generating steam for power.  The steam was used to power large centrifugal blowers inside the hot blast stoves.  These blowers compressed the air which was then fed to the furnace.

As you compress air, it becomes hot and that is where the intense heat was developed to melt the raw materials.  These are the hot blast stoves.




We got there right after Halloween.  We really lucked out because for the month before Halloween, the whole place is turned into the biggest haunted steel mill you have ever heard of.  It must have taken an hour at least to walk through the whole thing, IF YOU MADE IT THROUGH.  They were just starting to clean it up when we walked through.






This guy didn't make it!!

Neither did this guy.



Or this guy.



As we continued to pick our way through all of the bodies and body parts, we could only imagine what it must have been like after dark with spooky lights and monsters jumping out of the shadows at you.

This was just one of many large machinery rooms that we walked through.



We finally got to the actual blast furnace.  It was several stories high and massive.








After all of the materials were melted in the furnace, they were released out of the bottom of the furnace where they ran down the channel in the sand (Sow) to the Pigs which were molded into the sand floor of the casting shed.

The sand floor was sloped away from the furnace to facilitate the metal flowing down to the pigs.  The building was huge.




Eventually the sand casting method was replaced by long conveyor belts of molds that received the molten metal directly from the furnace.  This picture I got from the internet shows what it probably looked like.



The conveyors are stacked out in back now.



In this picture you can see one of the individual molds.



The pigs were then loaded onto rail cars and transported to the mill that would transform them into their final form.

These guys didn't make it out either.



When we completed our walking tour that took about an hour, we hit the road again headed westbound.

More to follow,

Tom & Suzie

National Infantry Museum, Fort Benning, Georgia

Fort Benning, Georgia

After we left Marathon, we started what we hoped would be a slow drive westbound across the country.  We wanted to go slow and travel on back roads as much as possible to see things we had not seen before.

Our first stop was Columbus, Georgia to visit the National Infantry Museum.  We had been here before and had discovered one of the most interesting presentations of American Heroism that we have ever experienced.





The museum is a very large facility located on Fort Benning.  




As you enter the front door, you are directed to the beginning of a self guided tour.  You walk through a dark entrance tunnel into a life size diorama that puts you into the middle of a battle during the Revolutionary War.  There are lights flashing and guns firing and it looks dark and dirty and bloody and you really get a chill up your spine as you imagine being in that situation.

As you continue to walk forward through history, the darkness, and it is so dark you can hardly see, the noise of gunfire and shouting and explosions really draws you into the moment being depicted by the diorama.

Then you transition into the Civil War.



Flash photography is not permitted because it would spoil the mood so all of the pictures we took are very dark.  I have tried to photo 
shop them to make them a little bit more visible but it tends to spoil the effect that we felt being there in the dark.

Next comes World War I and you are in a muddy, dark trench getting ready to go "Over the top" to attack across "No Mans Land".  There is now LOTS of gunfire and explosions and machine gun fire and it is hard to imagine climbing out of the trench and into ?????



We also get our first introduction into "House to house combat"

Next comes World War II and things get really loud now.  Lots of yelling and shooting and explosions.



We are at "D" Day on Omaha Beach and it must have been something to see. 

Next comes Korea.

It must have been miserable.  Temperatures in the winter below zero and the soldiers wearing mild weather clothing because America wasn't prepared to fight a war in the bitter cold of Korea in the winter. 



Throughout the walk through the various wars and battles, they had stories of individuals that were involved in the making of history.  

One diorama was of the last bayonet charge of the Korean War involving Captain Lewis Millett.





It was so dark in the diorama that I could not get a picture of the text that described what the diorama was depicting so I got the following information off the internet describing what happened.

                                                  Lewis Millett

"We had acquired some Chinese documents stating that Americans were afraid of hand-to-hand fighting and cold steel...

When I read that, I thought, 'I'll show you, you sons of bitches!'"

WASHINGTON (Nov. 19, 2009) -- Retired Col. Lewis L. Millett, who received the Medal of Honor during the Korean War for leading what was reportedly the last major American bayonet charge, died Nov 14. 

Millett, 88, died in Loma Linda, Calif., last weekend after serving for more than 15 years as the honorary colonel of the 27th Infantry Regiment Association.

Millet received the Medal of Honor for his actions Feb. 7, 1951. He led Company E, 27th Infantry, 25th Infantry Division, in a bayonet charge up Hill 180 near Soam-Ni, Korea.

A captain at the time, Millet was leading his company in an attack against a strongly held position when he noticed that a platoon was pinned down by small-arms, automatic, and antitank fire.

Millett placed himself at the head of two other platoons, ordered fixed bayonets, and led an assault up the fire-swept hill. In the fierce charge, Millett bayoneted two enemy soldiers and continued on, throwing grenades, clubbing and bayoneting the enemy, while urging his men forward by shouting encouragement, according to his Medal of Honor citation.

"Despite vicious opposing fire, the whirlwind hand-to-hand assault carried to the crest of the hill," the citation states. "His dauntless leadership and personal courage so inspired his men that they stormed into the hostile position and used their bayonets with such lethal effect that the enemy fled in wild disorder."

During the attack, Millett was wounded by grenade fragments but refused evacuation until the objective was firmly secured. He recovered, and after the war went to attend Ranger School.

In the 1960s he ran the 101st Airborne Division Recondo School, for reconnaissance-commando training, at Fort Campbell, Ky. Then he served in a number of special operations advisory assignments in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. He founded the Royal Thai Army Ranger School with help of the 46th Special Forces Company. This unit is reportedly the only one in the U.S.Army to ever simultaneously be designated as both Ranger and Special Forces.

Millet retired from the Army in 1973.

"I was very saddened to hear Col. Millett passed away," said Maj. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., the current commanding general of the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. "He was a rare breed, a true patriot who never stopped serving his country. He was a role model for thousands of Soldiers and he will be missed."

After Korea came Viet Nam.  This was very well done.

They had a special room off of the main walking tunnel that you went into.  There was a warning sign on the door advising that if you are afraid of loud noises, flashing lights or dark, confined jungle areas you should stay out.

It was very dark, hot and humid.  Immediately after walking through the door into the room, you are in a dense jungle.  

As you wind your way down a path, you are suddenly ambushed.  It is really scary.  

As you continue down very dark section of the path, you come across a booby trap on the path,  Punji Stakes in a hole in the floor.  This would really ruin your day.  This was all you could see.



Sharpened bamboo stakes arranged to injure your foot and leg if you stepped into the hole that would have been covered with leaves and twigs and not nicely lit up like this one.


Next came Iraq and Afghanistan.  Very interesting.















There was a lot more to see inside the museum and it took several hours to walk through all of the displays.

Then, we were able to get on a free tour bus for a ride over to  an old company area where we toured through a barracks, mess hall, orderly room and supply room.

It was really weird going through this area because it reminded me of when I went to basic training with my best friend Jeff Ogden at Fort Knox, Kentucky back in the summer of 1971.  This barracks was very similar to the barracks buildings that we lived in and it brought back lots of memories.





Our barracks was more crowded than this because all of our beds were bunk beds.  Lots of snoring guys and no air conditioning.  We got to Fort Knox in July and it was VERY hot and humid.



It took a few days to get used to using the bathroom with 10 other guys all at once, but with drill sergeants screaming to hurry up at the tops of their lungs you adapted quickly!



When we had inspections, we laid out or field gear like this.



Our foot lockers had to be laid out "just so" and everyone was exactly the same.



This is a tremendous place to visit and if you ever get a chance, We hope you will go by and spend a few hours there.  It will change you forever.






More to come,

Tom & Suzie

Winter Road Trip 2016

Greetings from the road.

We left our Marathon, Florida summer quarters this year at the end of October.

Before we left, we went to the big, week long end of summer Fantasy Fest celebration in Key West.  This celebration comes at the end of October and is held during the quiet time in Key West when all of the summer tourists have left and before the winter snowbirds arrive.  It is an amazing gathering and has some unbelievable sights.

The City closes the entire 1 mile length of Duval Street to vehicle traffic and then the crazies arrive along with a whole bunch of street vendors.

There are amazing costumes of ALL sorts!!!



There were also interesting things to eat.  How about a smoked turkey drumstick or some alligator on a stick???

   

There were a lot of people with interesting paint jobs.

  Mermaid??

                                           Peacock????
      Fred Flintstone and 2 witches

                              Tiger Lady















There were a lot of creative ideas out there but this guy had one of the best.  He was quite old and was in a wheel chair.  He had several assistants dressed in hospital scrubs.

He is operating a "Yes Ma'am O Gram" and was offering free mammograms.

His assistants in the hospital scrubs would contact women as they strolled down the street and explain the need for a "Yes Ma'am O Gram" and many of the women gladly participated.

The procedure was for the old man to put the small end of the device up to his eyes.  He would then peer through the cardboard tube and the assistants would place the other end of the cardboard "Device" over the woman's chest.  When everything was in place, the women would lift up their tops and expose their breasts to the device.  When they did, the flashing blue lights would light up and spin and the old man would REALLY smile.  

Genius!!!

There were al lot more crazies out there and we have pictures we would be happy to share but they are more explicit.  Click HERE and we will send those out individually in an e-mail.

More to come soon,

Tom & Suzie