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