I first found two related prints in the coal bunker a while back. I was thrilled to find them and they were in almost perfect condition. I don’t remember but I’m pretty sure I never found any in that building again. I started finding them, a couple a week, in the main office and I have continued to find them up until last week where I hit #17.
I have tried a few methods to share these large drawings here on the site. I unfolded them on the floor and took photos which doesn’t do them justice. Next time around I used one of those wide shot photos in a video which I cropped and zoomed with keyframes, so it scrolled around the print to see the different parts. Not only was this again a poor recreation of the work, but it is tedious to do. Last week I just took a few up close photos of portions of the print. This improved the quality obviously, but you are seeing 10% of the print. Something had to be done.
I started calling places Monday morning of this week. I called a total of five:
Refused to take the business (low volume)
Refused to take the buinsess (low volume)
Approx. $35 to scan them all, but $250 minimum order
Initially quoted $300, then brought it down to $180.
Quoted $35 – to do them all!
So it was basically a no brainer. Best of all, the outfit was local (I would have shipped them to any location). I shipped them on Tuesday and by Wednesday afternoon I had the PDFs in the cloud, ready for download! Can’t thank Mike at Accurate Repro of Naperville IL enough for the excellent work done by he and his team. Best of all, they also do mounting on foam board. Initially he offered to mount a print of one of the scans but I asked if he could mount one of the actual prints and not shockingly, he said he could. We went back and forth to choose the best one and he then offered to laminate it as well. At almost 70 years old I figured that was a good idea!
Don’t mind my crooked receptacle.
The prints are all available in the document archive right now but I figured I’d share some interesting bits from each with my thoughts as well. Best part about these PDFs is that I can copy sections in Acrobat and then paste into MS Paint and resize – better than a screenshot!
I shared this last week (I took photos of the physical print). Unfortunately, this map was one of the most impacted by time. It looks like it might be the original print and someone actually drafted it with a pencil (making this the only, or at least the original copy). Much of it has totally faded, including the info box in the lower right hand corner. What little I can read does look like it was drafted in-house.This one is notable because it has two different engineering firm’s stamps. Dravo actually created the print (they designed the ammonia still – I have the manual!. Years later, Orbital was hired to assess it’s condition and Acme (which was Interlake when Dravo designed) must have furnished them with the print.Both of these prints related to a dust collection system for a conveyor only referred to as ‘W’ conveyor. Clearly in the coal handling area, these two prints are marked ‘proposition #1’ and ‘proposition #2’.This is taken from a 1969 print, designed in-house, to install new spiral heat exchangers in the light oil cooler area. I found this print accompanied by a detailed specification and a bid form, so a vendor could try to bring Interlake’s dreams to reality.Almost 30 years later, I THINK this is a print detailing a potential change to the same heat exchangers described in the previous print. This plan shows adding two additional unit and relocating the two existing ones. I chose this closeup as it is some of the only really detailed electrical and/or hydraulic diagrams on any print.Easily the best condition prints in my possession, these are also the first I found (as mentioned at the beginning of this post, in the coal bunker). I have two such prints (one for each battery), and they detail ultrasonic testing to the gas headers. Again by often used firm Orbital Engineering, the measured the wall thickness of the pipe in hundreds of locations, then created charts to contrast the measurement from four years prior (1989). I added the yellow highlights to show the only places where the thickness had diminished in that span. Only at D7 is there a loss of more than 1/1000th of an inch (in this snippet – there are hundreds more measurements for this battery alone).Again by our friends at Orbital, this time an inspection of the HKC emission duct. This unit drew away emissions released during an oven push. Using a conveyor belt, the duct pivoted to each of the 50 ovens on each battery, and pulled them with a large fan hundreds of feet away from the batteries. In 1996, the duct was in very bad shape, and Acme knew it. Orbital did a full inspection (and again, two enormous prints to prove their labors) and we can presume the duct was replaced, or at least patched back together.One of the more disturbing documents I have located is a proposal from a company based in SLC Utah called Savage Industries. It seems Acme was toying with the idea of farming out their CCH department to Savage who would actually lease the coal handling parcel of land and run the departments. Funny that for such a large undertaking, Savage refers to the coke storage area near the wharf (not pictured here, check out the print) as the COAL storage area. Big difference guys! The ‘print’ is literally just a very rudimentary drawing showing how they might move things around if they got the gig (which as far as I know, they never did).Besides the massive conveyor belt that brought coke to 107th and Burley, the suspension bridge that traversed the Calumet also held a number of pipes sending COG to the blast furnace, and others in the alternate direction.…and here is the ‘alternate’ I referred to, in this 1956 print by Wilputte. I get some tiny sense of reassurance seeing references to geographical locations at the plant, because any piping was long ago removed. Funny, because even the wharf is just a mostly flat piece of land that almost no one could identify, but at least I know where it SHOULD be, so I can visualize this just a bit.Hopefully you don’t get a sore neck trying to make sense of this tidbit, extracted from ‘STEAM PIPING TB TO BATTERY T5 ARRANGEMENT’ from 1957. I’m well aware of what steam is used for on the batteries but I know neither what TB nor T5 refers to. This print is old enough to be my father but doesn’t share a father’s guidance!This one is especially interesting. I believe this is fairly geographical with the top of this photo being south. ‘Coal Bin’ is what I called the coal bunker. There is indeed a break in the ground floor, and a wall dividing things in half (I only recently realized this). Now I know that side as the ‘reversing room’ (likely referring to the regular reversal of gas flow through the flues that heated the ovens). What is labeled ‘end oven’ would be the northern end of battery #2. Of special note is the faded staircase on the upper left (SE) corner of the ‘coal bin’. This was likely a staircase to the basement – this area was clearly caved in purposefully during the closure of the plant. The pipe work bisecting the coal bin/reversing room must be related to what can be seen through the access panels in the floor on the west wall. I had been trying to lower myself down into the basement for a few weeks but as of this writing it is still filled with water, and I haven’t yet determined a method to easily escape the area once my investigations are completed. Spring shall be here soon, and I shall be in the basement to check the ‘B.F. Gas Flow’ once again!
