Acorn Shipyard, Rochester July 2018

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mookster

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This place is a little surprise really, I had written it off as not worth a look after a spate of fires destroyed two of the workshops last year as well as some smaller buildings but it's a really great example of smaller scale British heavy industry, with pretty much all the machinery and tools left from when the company went bust in 2016. Mikeymutt's photos he showed me last week spurred me on to go as I realised it was a place that was right up my street as I love British industry such as this.

There isn't a great deal of information online about Acorn Shipyard however as mentioned above the company went bust in September 2016 and shortly thereafter two of the large buildings were destroyed by fires. Situated where it is it's sadly been a prime target for local morons but thankfully although the fabric of the buildings have been affected by graffiti etc, the internals are still pretty intact. There were workshops devoted to both woodwork and metalworking, it was quite nice seeing machinery built at the now demolished Wadkin Woodworking Machinery factory in Leicester sitting in there as that's another place I managed to explore a few years back.

The only bad part about this explore was the weather - considering we'd enjoyed weeks and weeks of blazing sun we had to visit it on the one afternoon where it was blowing a gale and raining horizontally - which didn't make shooting the two buildings ravaged by fire that much fun!

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Thanks for looking :)
 
Lovely mate.it really is a pleasant surprise ain't it.i knew you would like it
 
Mikey even has the good luck of decent weather too, he's such a jammy bugga:biggrin-new: Not much roof left by the looks of it, well at least it weren't freezing cold rain haha. Some good shots there mookster, I do like this!
 
Excellent. Shame to see all that machinery sat there rusting away though :(
 
Interesting explore.

The machine with four small steel wheels at the bottom and two bulbous parts near the top. staggered in height and a motor atop (impossible to describe!!) is a metal guillotine/shear/notcher and punch. I used one when a blacksmith at a coal mine. The chopping action is mechanical and uses the high inertia of internal flywheels - once triggered to chop there's no stopping it and no control over speed. Kinda strange but I thought I'd never see one of them again. Nowadays they're hydraulic and have lots of control over the operation.

Always good to see machinery where it once worked - that's becoming rarer and rarer now with industry mostly closing down in the UK. The very fact that useful machines stand abandoned says it all - that we simply buy manufactured goods in from overseas..
 
The very fact that useful machines stand abandoned says it all - that we simply buy manufactured goods in from overseas..

The images do tell the reason why we buy from abroad and do not do much home production - Total lack of investment in modern machine tools. The machinery pictured was outdated and probably knackered before it was installed at this location - no sign of DRO or CNC controls. This machine shop reminds me of the machine shops full of war time Lease - Lend tooling that I encountered when I started work in the early '60's and that continued to be used, in some cases well into the late '80's. Typical UK lack of investment in up to date machinery - a good machine setter will obviously keep an old machine producing to production dimensional limits with constant supervision and machinery down time! Modern machines will produce far more items, far more cheaply and with less human interference. We started the industrial production revolution and I suppose it is natural that we now progress to be a producer and issuer of plans and designs for others to actually produce - I mean; one does not want to get one's hands dirty, if one can avoid it.
 

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