This is a classic shot! It evokes all the memories of what used to make Britain Great. People who worked in Steel for years and looking at this image can still recall the thrill of tapping time on the furnaces at Skinningrove – once you’ve got Steel in your blood it never leaves you! They can feel the heat from the metal in front of the worker on the right and can still remember how cold their back used to feel, when standing and watching the fettling process as a furnace was tapped. Eric Johnson tells us: “The ‘mud gun’ (used to stop the flow of iron when tapping was finished) can be seen on the left; lit by the light from the molten iron.” Above that and running like a band across the image is the ”bustle” which carried the blast furnace gas to feed the furnace. The flag-like objects sticking up in the image were stoppers to stop (or allow) the flow of metal along the runners and into the pots. One of them will be a skimmer used to divert any slag running on top of the iron into a slag pot. This was no place for a stranger to the business – hot, gassy and easy to get in the wrong place! Arthur Ormrod advises us: ”A correction to the comments if I may. The bustle carried the hot blast, preheated air, which was fed into the furnace through the tuyeres, the blast of the blast furnace. Blast furnace gas, carbon monoxide, is collected from the top of the furnace, cleaned, and then used as a fuel in the works, including being burned to heat the hot blast.”
Many thanks to Eric Johnson and Arthur Ormerod for those updates.
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