Evil looking metal device

Great Leap Forward communal popcorn popper.

It also resembles the crucible from a foundry car:

Well, it is built to contain high pressure (count dem rivets!), and has some pipe-like fittings. Possibly a chemical reaction vessel of some kind. I've seen shockwave apparatus with cones like the one on the left.

Or, I could be overthinking it, and this is a kind of oil pump.

'Looks like a tumbler. I'd say a coke/ore grinding mill, but they're usually built around crushing rolls these days.

It's some kind of tumbling mill, though.

"Ed Huntress" fired this volley in news:4dc97ec0$0$19695$ snipped-for-privacy@cv.net:

"Ball mill" is what came to mind. For a long time, metals ores were broken down into processable particles with ball mills; especially precious metals ores.

LLoyd

Looks like a rail wagon for holding molten steel, last time I saw one was in Dortmund in Germany at the Hoesch steel works .

Ah, it looks like you've nailed it. Someone told me he saw similar things used to transport molten steel in Melbourne, and Hamilton is a steel town.

Looks like they call them "submarine cars".

Thanks!

Yeah but it's not a car. Look close, it's sitting on cribbing.

It's on a railway car. Maybe a new one being transported to the steel plant.

If it's for hauling molten steel, most likely it's being transported to the scrap yard.

Continuous casting has all but eliminated the transportation of molten steel. Some specialty steels, like tool steel, are still handled that way. But the bulk of basic steel, including structural grades, plain carbon graded steels, and even some alloyed steels are continuous-cast today, practically everywhere in the world.

Make that pig iron. Looks like a brand new unit to me (one of several that were visible).

Mechanical Engineers' Handbook: Materials and Mechanical Design, Volume 1, Third Edition. sez..

"Today the vast majority of pig iron is poured directly from the furnace into a refractory-lined vessel (submarine car) and transported in liquid form to a basic oxygen furnace (BOF) for refinement into steel".

Right on the pig iron. That appears to be the predominant method for the iron.

Googling Torpedo Rail Car or Torpedo Ladle Rail Car pulls up many just like it, but bigger.

Dave

Something that doesn't need to be 3720x1624?

Hint:

Googling Torpedo Rail Car or Torpedo Ladle Rail Car pulls up many just like it, but bigger.

Dave

Whatever it is, it is one BIG puppy.

Steve

When I was in college, I did a couple of weeks testing particulate emissions at Granite City Steel. They used these cars. They ran on a track on one side of the smelter. They would tap the iron in one direction and the slag in the other. The tilting slag cars ran on a track on the other side. Those were even more evil looking. They would dump the molten slag into a big cooling pond.

That whole place was a sight to behold.

Paul K. Dickman

While we're on the subject of rail transporters for molten iron, I'm reminded of an old question of mine: Back in the late 1970s there was a huge flood in Johnstown, PA. I remember hearing that at least one of these cars was trapped in the flood. So, the question is, how do you deal with what has become essentially a large (really large) chunk of solid iron?

It's like a day in an inferno. I was on an AISI press junket around 1979, bused around the Midwest from the US Steel plant near the shore of Lake Michigan to coal mines in southern Illinois for four days, stopping at a variety of mills along the way. I've toured a lot of large-scale basic manufacturing plants, but the big basic steel operations took my breath away.

When they soaked a charge of coke with water to stop it burning, in a house-sized chamber outside of the plant, the ash and smoke looked like it must have trailed into Ohio. The pollution was staggering. My white shirts (this was a suit and tie affair) were all ruined by the time I got home.

Ah! Thanks! First it looked like Doc Brown's latest model, but now I see the Verne influence. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

When I was in college, one summer I worked as a "hot metal weigher" on the blast furnaces. "hot metal" was steel talk for the molten iron that was tapped from the furnace. I sat in a little shed that had the balance beam for a rail platform just outside. They would run these enormous cars onto the platform just a few feet from me and I would weigh them.

It was a cushy job: 3 or 4 cars at a time, 3 or 4 times a shift. Sleep or read the rest of the time. Union rates - $2.50 an hour, IIRC, which was 3 or 4x minimum wage. I wasn't complaining, but I knew that it wasn't a good way to run things.

Bob