STEEPLEJACK'S CORNER 2012

[Stanley]

Bent chimney at Atkinson’s, Bingley.

[Stanley]

Bent chimney at Bacup.

[Stanley]

[Stanley]

There was a bent chimney near the Riggs Garden centre at Walsden. Peter said it was annoying when chisels and other round objects rolled off the scaffold!

[Tizer]

BBC, 8 February 2015
`Humberstone: A Chilean ghost town's English past'
"Cast your eye across a map of northern Chile and amid the Spanish and indigenous place names, one name stands out as peculiarly English. Humberstone is a former mining town in the Atacama Desert, a few hundred kilometres from Chile's borders with Peru and Bolivia. It was named after James Humberstone, a British chemical engineer who emigrated to South America in 1875. He made his fortune from saltpetre, which was dug out of caliche - the nitrate-rich crust of the desert - and used to make fertilizer.....".
More here, with photos: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-31090757

[Stanley]

South America was a favourite destination for British engineers and miners. Richard Trevithick went there when he couldn't get his high pressure engines accepted by conservative British buyers. The Fairlie crane reminds me that Fairlie wrote the two volume 'Treatise on the Steam Engine' in 1870. Welsh miners in Chile.... Welsh still spoken there. Railways in S America...

[Stanley]

The stack at Carleton College Northfield Minnesota. It wouldn't look out of place in Lancashire......

[Stanley]

Chimneys weren't the only things that could develop a lean... When N&R were demolishing Ellenroad this access and toilet tower was left until the rest of the site was cleared. I mentioned to Norman one day that it seemed to be leaning out and he said I was right. I hadn't realised that as the weight of the mill was taken off the ground it started to swell and the tower was gradually moving. This led to a situation where Shepherd's safety man banned all access to the area round the tower and Norman asked him how we were to get near enough with the crane to ball it down. No answer! Norman's answer was to wait while he had gone and ball it down, He told the safety man it had fallen over during the night!
Shepherd's were the main contractors and I told Gavin to tell the surveyors to re-check their level pegs. It turned out they had all risen and had to be adjusted.

[Invernahaille]

Hi Stanley.
Do you know or can you recall what the Ellenroad site sold for?

[Stanley]

I never knew Robert. I suspect it was reasonable because access and the presence of the engine were disadvantages.

[Stanley]

The mill in 1984 when I first saw it. All they wanted me to do was get rid of the mill and save the engine and chimney. Nowt to it.... On the quiet I wondered how desperate a bloke had to be to take a job like this on! When my first Manpower Service Manager came down to look at the job I watched him as we walked round and when we got in the site hit afterwards I told him I knew what he was thinking. Overwhelmed by the size of the job! I told him not to worry, I felt the same way. All we had to do was have a plan and quietly get bits of it done and in the end we'd get there. I was right of course, we all grew into the job but I can assure you that at that time it was a leap of faith......

[Invernahaille]

Such a shame! At least it provided a few hundred people with a living (if you could call it a living) for seventy years.
There was a great community feeling about the mill.

[Stanley]

The trouble was Robert that the cotton industry had had its day and the mills were very hard to adapt to other uses, the permitted floor loadings were very small. OK for mail order warehouses and making cigarettes but not much else. Some were used briefly for battery hens but the bottom fell out of that market... This one that Norman knocked down at Ripponden was full of chicken muck!

[Stanley]

Nice boots.....

[Stanley]

It struck me yesterday that those cord trousers are the Hebden Bridge cords that gave up the ghost at weekend.... They did well! The bootgs are still going strong after 40 years.

[Invernahaille]

Stanley,
When I first saw the pic you posted I thought it was young Tom.

[Stanley]

His boots aren't as clean as that. Done off Brooke Edgeley's Yorkshire laddering when they did the total refurb.

John Burlison has sent me this pic of the remaining access tower at Bamber Bridge Mill. There was a move to 'save' it but the fact that they are building a platform for the high reach machine looks ominous. Pic done in late January 2015.

[Stanley]

Half way through the demolition of Ellenroad Mill at Newhey. You can see from this picture how relatively flimsy the construction is once the building is opened up. By the time it was built the architects understood exactly what the floor loadings were for the light textile machinery and designed accordingly to keep the cost down. The big problem when converting these buildings to other uses was that the floors wouldn't stand heavy point loadings like fork lift trucks or heavy machinery.

[Stanley]

When Norman was balling the structure down it was frightening to see how the failure of one pillar led to the collapse of the structure around it. A good illustration of how flimsy the build was. Norman told me that the biggest danger when we cut the connections between the rope race and the main mill was that a high wind could bring down the entire structure. Its integrity depended on everything being connected and once that was altered the whole structure was unstable.

[Invernahaille]

The decking on the floors at Ellenroad was wood (which over the years was saturated with oil). Was this removed before the demolition, Stanley?

[Stanley]

Robert, a lot of the maple boarding was taken up for recycling. Lots of it still in good condition but some spoiled by water ingress on the top floors. When it gets wet it expands and the floor looked like the waves on the sea!



I laid this floor of reclaimed Jarrah for Janet in Oz in 1989. If you look at the right hand side you'll see the folding wedges I used to get the boards tight. It looked lovely when sanded and sealed but I warned them that if it ever got wet they were in trouble. This was how the Maple floors were laid in the mill but instead of battens underneath they had heavy diagonal soft wood boarding. Same method used for high quality Maple dance floors.

[Stanley]

I forgot to mention that the men who came to sand and seal the floor noticed how tight the joints were and wanted to know how I had done it. They were interested in the folding wedges. When the mill floors were laid the contractors used flooring cramps where possible that clamped onto the joists below. This wouldn't be possible with a floor laid on diagonal boarding and I suspect they used the folding wedges....

[Stanley]

Tom and I had an interesting discussion on the old site about the wedge arrangement that was used to retain the bands on at least one chimney, Proctor Stokers foundry in Burnley. I never liked the idea as it didn't allow the bands any room for movement when rust started to build behind the bands. In extreme cases this can crush the brickwork. The common upturned ends and bolts allowed the band to stretch. Peter fitted the bands on Ellenroad at the chimney head loose and resting on copper pegs in the brickwork. They were only there to arrest any movement in the brickwork so didn't need to be tight.
Here is a joint on the stack at Queen Street Mill in Burnley that is under pressure but has allowed the band to accommodate the stress. They gave the game away and shouted for attention!

[David Whipp]

When Fernbank chimney was felled, one of the bands from the top came crashing down after the fire was lit. Steeplejack said this was probably due to the brickwork expanding with the heat, breaking the corroded metal.

[Stanley]

I saw it happen and commented to Doc just before it occurred that if I was the spotter at the bottom of the chimney I'd move further away. He was lucky, they are substantial lumps, usually 4" wide and 1/2" thick.....