Bit warm!

[muskrat]

G'day Fellas.
Getting the old girl ready to ride to work (as she missed out on the w/end). Will leave 1/2 hour early to ride the long way. Was minus 4C at 6:30 so hope it gets up to 0C when I leave at 8:00.
Cheers
ps: we are hearing of heat related deaths up there. Keep hydrated folks.

[berger]

musky they keep telling us to stay in because if you're over 65 you might die, ffs in the heat wave here in 76 i worked with men in their 60's on coke ovens that were 1430 c inside , namby pamby country i live in , it has had it , broken britain by lentil luvvie loonatics .

[Black Sheep]

I too remember the summer of 1976, travelling each weekend between Anglesey and Norfolk on my Norton 99 (which I still have). Sometimes I would ride through a thunderstorm and spend the rest of the ride drying out. This time the humidity is much higher which makes cooling down more difficult. Nothing broken Britain or namby pamby about that. Working in coke ovens at 1430 degrees (are you sure about the temperature?) would certainly not be allowed now and that has to be progress.
 

[Worty]

There's an expectation that it'll break records.  I think the hottest previously was 40.3C, but could go as high as 41-42C! 🥵🌶  Most homes don't have a/c built in, although the offices where my sons work do.  In the hospital where Sue works, they turn the a/c OFF at lunchtime, but they may make an exception for the next few days.  It's all due to end Friday/Saturday, when we should be back to the 'norm' of mid-20s (perfect riding whether so long as the rain stays off too).

Well done Musky for the cold weather riding.  Most of my riding these days is tootling around far and wide, with no particular place to go, so I like the warmer weather for that.

At 7.00am it was 26.5C, the fans are going already.

[Colsbeeza]

Hi Berger,  Pfft!!. We lived in a cardboard box in middle of street - Oops wrong yarn. In my first year after school, I worked at a steelworks as a cadet engineer and in the first week in February (peak of the Oz summer) the workers went on a 10-day strike, so we staff manned the Coke Ovens. I was a lidman, and the air temperatures were above 55 deg C. As we were inexperienced, the lids were poorly sealed and I could not see for the smoke from the lids. As the charger was coming out it had a chain attached to the axle whch struck a steel disc as a warning. I panicked and ran to the other end of the battery, jumping over some open holes with flames blowing out for several metres. Not an experience I could forget. Later in my 4th year as a cadet I graduated to Ram Driver. Lots of stories there.
Sorry nothing on the bikes today.
Col

[berger]

black sheep my mistake but i do now remember the heater man having readings on pyrometer of 1325 and having to adjust gas flow in the flues, Col i also had the oven top saga of poorly sealed lids and the charger clanging. one nutter used to hop from mushroom to mushroom on the lids, if you made a mistake on the charger the arm to lift the lid would push the mushroom down in the lid and you had to change the lid they were HEAVY!.  pic shows grease on fire on drive chains

[berger]

bring back memory's col?

[Joolstacho]

Think that's dangerous? You should'a been art directing fashion model photography like I had to do BITD.

[Colsbeeza]

Jools, That sound terifying . I would rather stick to the Coke Ovens.
Berger, I also was tried out as Extractor driver. On my first shift, I went to sleep at 2am and woke when the foreman pointed out the pile of coke over the hotcar and onto the tracks . Not happy Jan!. Hours of shovelling later, After doing this a second time I was sacked from Extractor driving. I was 19.

[berger]

Col i trained on every coke oven job from age 16 when they employed me after reading my terrible last school report , and they even sent me to tech with 6 other lads to study coal carbonisation and by products.  i had a couple of weeks to a month on every job, water treatment ,boiler house , power house , some good turbines in there ,coal handling, coke ovens all jobs , coke warf , primary and secondary crusher houses ,  coke screens, coke re screens,  exhauster house , gas purifiers , oxide plant , burner house , sulphuric acid plant , salt house, effluent plant, benzole plant , gas booster house some good compressors in there, tar plant, coke and coal sampling labs,   but the story ends with this, when i was on the coke car catching the burning coke to get it to the quencher the old geeza who was showing me the method of doing this job had a snooze in a small space behind me because he trusted me after i had caught many ovens but it started raining and when i was braking the car was sliding down the railway tracks, i tried to back the brakes off and gently put them on to stop this but i hit the buffers under the quencher tower at speed that shot me into the wired window and him forward into me and properly woke him up, he then had to check the coupling and stop buffers because i hit them so hard. i ended up on the benzole plant being burnt by fine spray from tiny holes in pipes  with benzole laden creosote at 130oC .  the good news is i ended up in the stores for the last 4 years of the plants life and did win the lottery , sheds loads of goodies, thankyou for listening have a nice day and don't forget those types of jobs and the chemicals i was exposed to are going to kill you if look at them, that's why we can't have creosote anymore it is creocote CRAP!just like this scary bit of sun we are having in this woke country . , now for another black&tan and don't let them lefty's call me racist cos i drink them coloured uns 

[berger]

one for musky from heat to freezing fingers and i had to navigate the steps to go and take a temp reading [ elf and safety hahaa] and get a steam pipe to thaw the valves so i could adjust the flows.

[berger]

boring back to the temps now if we had a sticker ie the pusher couldn't push the coke out it would trip the eclectics and then they upped the temps - black sheep to cake it some more for a few hours hence my 1430c i remember now it's all coming back , we had to wind the ram beam back out by hand then dig the coke out at the front and back of the oven then try again and then if it still stuck there was a chance it could push the oven walls out into the flues. a lot ovens went what we called over the top ie it stuck part way through pushing and the coke came over the ram beam head   [that ram beam head weighed 5 tons on its own  ]  then we had to put a big steel box in on the oven floor and shove that through with the ram to sweep the oven. i have known a ram stick part way through a push and the electrics tip and you are talking some big amps and the ram head and beam start twisting putting that 150 ton machine out of action and we got 20pence for cleaning up every sticker , wow!

[berger]

named as the most polluted site in Europe left dormant for many years until over a hundred million was spent cleaning it up , if not interested look up the avenue coking plant wingerworth chesterfield that is now a housing estate, now where is my bar women with my B&T . o dear she is stlll moaning about it's too hot

[BagONails]

Some good memories there Bergs and Col, sounds like hell on earth probably a good thing we gave it all away to China!

As a third year apprentice I had a placement in QC at Ford's Thames Foundry in Dagenham, Essex, it was summer and hot as hell also about the noisiest factory I have ever had the misfortune to work in. The basement was the worst all concrete and steel all sorts of foundry operations running on the three floors above and here in the basement was where they fettled the castings mostly big engine blocks and heads using pneumatic jack hammers with the castings on steel conveyors god it was awful!  My scariest moment was upstairs though on the melt floor where they transferred the molten iron from one of the 5 cupolas to a receiving furnace for various metallurgical treatments before filling the pouring vessels that were then taken to the mould lines. The transfer from Cupola to receiver was done using a huge 15 ton bucket and a massive fork lift.

One day after filling the bucket (for want of the correct term - ladle maybe?) with white hot molten iron the fork driver got the height of the step on the receiver slightly wrong and ran into it. I remember being transfixed as the bucket tipped forward and slopped a good amount of the molten contents all over the receiver and the cold steel floor where we were all standing...you've never seen middle aged blokes run so fast but I still beat them! The resulting fireworks were very impressive with sparks and molten iron fizzing and flying in all directions. Happily nobody was hurt and in no time everyone was back doing their jobs as if nothing had happened.

These days there would have to be a public enquiry and all production would stop for a month while the 'elf and safety' types crawled all over the operation. Thames was vast, in the eighties we made all Ford's grey and nodular iron castings for Europe engine blocks, heads, cranks, right down to rockers. Gearbox casings, Tractor blocks, truck blocks etc. running two shifts and everything was continuous flow production.

All gone now of course! 

[Rex]

Pffft...boy's stuff.
Should have tried ship-building, freezing in Winter, stifling in Summer and 'king noisy and dangerous all the time. Average 10 accidental deaths a week throughout the industry, and then came the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 which changed the safety culture overnight for the immeasurably better.
Nothing wrong with "elf and safety types" either, as long as it's industrial stuff and not silly people writing about kids playing conkers or making ice slides.
Dunno about exporting industry to China is in any way good. The West being in hock to an unfriendly and aggressive manufacturing colossus is undoubtedly going to bite us on the idiot at some point.