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Phase 5 1910
In 1910 the original No1 and 2 furnaces and the last remaining lift were demolished and a new No3a built with an identical bucket hoist to that used on the 2a. An overhead electric travelling crane operated over the full length of the pig beds and pig breaking machines, just beyond the furnaces.
Coke wagons and ore hoppers on the high line and North Eastern Railway Company coke wagons and hopper wagons on the exchange sidings.
The new building in front of the original blower house is the gas cleaning / scrubbing plant installed some years earlier. Philip Grosse states that local residents were complaining about damage to local agriculture from high sulphur emissions. In early blast furnaces the gas was simply discharged to atmosphere, but by this time, the gas was recovered. After cleaning the gas was used to heat the refractory within the stoves to raise the blast temperature. Blast furnace gas was low in calorific value, but there was a lot of it.
Phase 6 Up to 1929
The final major investment, around 1920 was to upgrade furnace 1a from 1500 to 2500 tons per week capacity. It received a substantial rebuild of the furnace top, with four off-takes, new downcomers and a double bell arrangement and was renumbered 1b.
Walkways link the tops of the stoves but these modern furnaces had no high level charging platform linking them. There would be little need for any furnaceman to be working at this level.
The ironworks ran with just one furnace in blast from 1920 until closure on 3rd December 1930 due to the prevailing economic climate. The 1923 Foundry Trade Journal reports that of the three furnaces: one was producing Hematite Iron, one was being relined, and one was dormant.
Not a clear image but useful to show how the inclined skip hoist on No 1a furnace (right) was threaded between the stoves. The elevated shed at the foot is the hoist house containing the motors and winding equipment.
The bucket hoist on 2a (left) was more direct from the bunkers and perpendicular to the high line.
Maps of the period show this quite well.
The structure to the right of 1a. is most likely a dust catcher (or whirler). Dirty gas from the furnace directed to the bottom and clean gas directed out the top.
What is not clear from any study of the images is how the raw materials were transferred from the bunkers to the hoists. The later arrangement at Workington, for example, employed an electric scale car running on tracks beneath the bunkers which drew materials from overhead gates, weighed them, then dropped them in to the bucket or the skip which was far below ground level. Perhaps the Carnforth furnaces only ever employed manual handling at ground level.
This represents the final part of the study of equipment remaining up to closure in 1929.
That concludes the general discussion on the changing face of the ironworks. Congratulations if you have been able to make sense of the furnace renumbering and didn't get confused. I know I did. Elsewhere among these pages I will discuss individual topics and you can either continue with the Blast Furnace, navigate using the sidebar left, or go to Contents and browse from there.
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