What is it? Set 448

#11 shows a 120-gallon used to boil cane juice. Kettles for this purpose appear thicker than the mystery item, probably to prevent hot spots.

I cheated and found the answer to #2599, the grinding stones. Here is someone's MySpace site with 90 pictures taken at the Museum of Appalachia, in Norris, Tn.

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From that area, the most likely was for a molasses kettle...

I wasn't back for a while; I see the posting from the shots from somebody else from the Applachian Museum identified the crusher.

I wasn't absolutely positive it was the same one--when I was last there it hadn't gotten in such bad shape yet as indicated by the picture on the other link when it was still intact...the current state is sad to see... :(

It's been 15 yr now since we moved back to the farm from the time spent in TN and I suppose probably had been 10 since had done anything except go to the festival weekends and not wandered the grounds much while still there. We were located about 15 mi southwest...

Interesting comment Michael, that was my tool of choice for them too. And I fiddled with them pretty regular. Motorola used them to secure the microphone cords on their Maxar/Moxy model line and I replaced a lot of them... Used to be the smallest version (don't know if that is still true) made by Channel Lock. Worked quite well too :)

These were about 8" long, and I would set them to one groove longer than parallel so that the Heyco would compress with little or no damage. I've done that on ones that ranged from 1/4" mounting hole, to ones that were over an inch in diameter.

This museum had a couple of smaller kettles that were marked as be

Yup, that is exactly how I used to do it and why the "groove" style plier worked so well. Now I don't feel quite so clever anymore, must have been an obvious solution ;-)

Not to my former co-workers. They told me that it was impossible to remove a Heyco, and reuse it without a lot of damage. :)

As I mentioned, the owner of these items had told me they were targets, they didn't have any noticeable dents in them so I was skeptical but went with that answer for lack of a better one. Someone just sent me an email stating:

"They are actually "frying pan" or "pancake" pipe line blanks, for blanking off product lines in manufacturing processes. I worked with them for 40 odd years. They are installed in the lines between flange fittings to prevent product flow in the lines while doing maintenance or repair."

Sounds reasonable so I went ahead and added this to my answer.

Yes, I recall, when working at Placid Refinery, Port Allen, La., those were used as blocks at flange fittings during maintenance operations. I initially thought they looked familiar.

Sonny

Patent number: 948686 Date: Feb 8, 1910

Great job on finding the patent! I'll send this to the owner, I was guessing it was from the 1920s.

Rob

That is it! Even the patent date matches. :-)

Enjoy, Don.

Maybe rendering lard or tallow on a commercial scale. Karl