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Visited this place with man gone wrong.its a small local brickworks established by building firm in the early thirties.at its height it employed forty people.they stopped making bricks in the fifties and started to make field drain pipes.there are three kilns on the site and these are oil fired,replacing fur older coal fired scotch kilns.the kilns are made of a lovely English brick and I did like the metal restraining straps arounf them.two of the kilns on the site are open and the third locked.it looks like some sort of fencing has been erected around the three kilns and two chimneys to protect them,but they are falling into severe disrepair.there is also a drying shed and a moulding shed..when I was looking at google earth at the site I was not expecting too much to be honest.we were pleasantly surprised when we got there how nice it was and we spent ages there,especially in the machine shed.it was like a little time warp.i enjoy these little places more than the big industrial giants.they seem to have a more personal feel to them as I could imagine a lot of the work on the buildings and kilns was prob done in house and buy local firms
the drying shed.this would have been heated to dry off the castings
This was the machine and moulding shed which was our favourite bit.not sure how the system worked in here.it looked to be a water driven system which drove pulley wheels outside and in turning the pulley belts to a cog system on the machine inside which was almost like a vertical conveyor going to the top.
So outside was a series of drums and channels.the water would feed into these channels.there was mounts in the concrete which would suggest there was maybe pumps situated here
he water would feed this large wheel.it looked like the water area was once covered
The big wheel then powered these pulley wheels in here here with pulley belts diving the other big wheel at the other end.
it all finally connected on here on the big machine and power these series of cogs
And this was the base of the machine
I climbed the tall ladder to see what was up the top and it was a hatch were the conveyor came out and there was a railway style track.so I wonder if the finished mouldings were sent here by track and sent down or up the conveyor system
Working back down some of the cogs and workings
Back on the ground floor some general shots around the shop,the solid metal cart was a beauty.would hated to push that about
We did look in both of the kilns one there is a raised sort of floor which is built up by bricks.these had regular arches in the brickwork to enable what I guess would be the oil pipes.the second kiln had a layer of bricks on top of the arch walls acting like a vented floor
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