19 Feb 15
Originally posted by joe shmoI worked at a place like that once. Goodyear Tire and Rubber in Watts California. After the riots.... The place was positively 19th century. I worked on a device called a Banbury 27, a rubber grinding tool. It was powered by a 2000 hp electric motor which spun up to 200 RPM and geared down to 16 RPM. You want torque? I'll give you torque! The power meter was in MEGAWATTS.
Yeah, J-town is about 60-70 miles southeast ish of Pittsburgh.
160 miles is one heck of a commute...I'm currently searching in the area, cant imagine 3 hrs of driving back and forth to work on a good travelling day, let alone on a typical Pennsylvania winter day!
I'm not much of a computer tech head. I just know how to use them (more or less). I did ...[text shortened]... e real "Dr. Frankenstein laboratory" type electrical equipment running the machines to this day!
It peaked at about 5 megawatts and then settled down to around 3 or so.
The actual grinder part was kind of like a roots blower, interlocking cams that mixed up 500 pounds of rubber at a time. It had injectors that injected various oils and powders to give them the kind of rubber then needed, then the output went to a series of rollers, the rubber was very pliable, and hot, I might add! After squishing it down to a large ribbon, it went through a series of water sprays to get the stuff down to a reasonable temperature, then to cutters where the assemblers would wrap a given length around a mold and stick it in the steam molder. THAT was a trip. When the molds released, it gave off a sound like a lion crying! And there were 200 of them at the plant, so there was this continuous lion sound, 24/7 and when it released, it was a new tire of whatever kind the mold made.
I worked on the Banbury electronics control room. A whole room devoted to just the controllers for that beast. There was a lot to it, it was a set of interlocking machinery that took in all the rubber products and lamp black and so forth, a 'modern' assembly that had negative pressure to keep the lamp black inside the machine. Before the Banbury came along, they just dumped the stuff into containers from the trains that came in and the whole neighborhood was coated with carbon dust. They couldn't hang clothes out on a line because the clothes would come out black! The Banbury eliminated all that dust and saved material too. It was a HUGE machine in total.