What wood did Ford use?

[glennpm]

Gary, your vacu-press, in its horizontal flat surface configuration would be the simplest use I can think of, and as for an explanation, the vacuum pump provides the equivalent of 28” of mercury of vertical pull, but don’t ask me how many pounds per square inch that equals. In my experience, that’s just the beginning of force applied, as the project, still under continuous vacuum, would then go into an autoclave or a hydroclave, the latter producing pressure and heat of over 1000psi and 350* F. My products were exit cones for everything from Minute Man to Atlas missiles and everything in between including Reagan’s Star Wars toys. My operation was near the beginning of those products of reinforced carbon, what followed was a month long proprietary process that made them hard as diamonds and could ring like a bell.
About hydroclaves… my company had one blow its top once. It took the roof off the factory and they found the 4 ton lid buried in a far corner of the asphalt parking lot. A human mistake made 6 widows that night.

Very interesting about the cones. 28" Hg = 13.75psi

I worked on many electric generating power plants. On one mid-West plant a materials engineer and I designed, specified and contracted rubber lined 6" and 8" rubber lined piping. The power plant had boiler discharge gases go through a scrubber which uses a limestone slurry. The limestone slurry is very abrasive and therefore the need for rubber lining to protect the carbon steel piping. The piping we designed was routed about 7 miles from the plant to a wallboard manufacturer that used the waste slurry to produce the wallboard.

The special designed and hard durometer rubber pipe lining in these "small" diameters was done by making a long balloon then folded, dragged through 40' of length after the pipe inside wall was blasted and adhesive coated. The ends of the liner were turned over end flanges and then put in an autoclave where under internal pressure and heat; cured to the pipe inside diameter. Large diameter, human accessible, is lined with overlapping sheets of chlorobutyl rubber lining.

About a year later we got a call from the utility to investigate rubber lining failure in ~36" diameter piping supplying the slurry to the scrubbers. This piping was from a different company. I had to crawl in and around a couple of bends to do an inspection. I had a headset, harness and rope back to the opening. Good thing I'm not claustrophobic I found in a couple of places where large sheets had pealed back. Root cause after we checked the rubber durometer and substrate was the rubber lined joints there were facing into the flow direction and this caused the eventual failures.

 

[ford38v8]

Glen, that’s an ingenious setup to remove hydrocarbons from exhaust gasses, only to be defeated by human error. Easy to place blame at the point of failure, harder to call out failed leadership.

 

[GB SISSON]

This little sidetrack has been good reading. I often wonder what all my friends here on the barn did in their working careers. So much so, that I thought of creating a thread on the subject. I don't see many off-topic threads here and understand that this is an early Ford forum, but let's face it, at our age bracket not too many of us are dragging home crusty old cars and trucks to restore. Ok, so what's an 'exit cone'? Took me a while but I gleaned that it's what we called a 'nose cone' as kids.

 

[ford38v8]

This little sidetrack has been good reading. I often wonder what all my friends here on the barn did in their working careers. So much so, that I thought of creating a thread on the subject. I don't see many off-topic threads here and understand that this is an early Ford forum, but let's face it, at our age bracket not too many of us are dragging home crusty old cars and trucks to restore. Ok, so what's an 'exit cone'? Took me a while but I gleaned that it's what we called a 'nose cone' as kids.

Ha! Two ends of a rocket: nose cone on one end, exit cone on the other!

 

[glennpm]

This little sidetrack has been good reading. I often wonder what all my friends here on the barn did in their working careers. So much so, that I thought of creating a thread on the subject. I don't see many off-topic threads here and understand that this is an early Ford forum, but let's face it, at our age bracket not too many of us are dragging home crusty old cars and trucks to restore. Ok, so what's an 'exit cone'? Took me a while but I gleaned that it's what we called a 'nose cone' as kids.

Yes, good idea. Good to have curious people interested in others

 

[GB SISSON]

Many, if not most of you have had interesting careers, starting as young men, maybe college,learning skills, fine tuning them and then retire and all that work, ingenious ideas, burning the midnight oil when necessary, is just a thing of the past. I have always enjoyed 'flathead fever's' stories about keeping the telephone company fleet rolling, no small task and others. For me the 1 1/2 hour ferry ride affords some time to visit with vacationing retired folks my age bracket and I always ask what they did for work. It's good that I like working since at 73 I haven't figured out how to retire yet. I kinda wonder if I'd like it...

 

[Ray in La Mesa]

The job I had when I was 55 disappeared so by cutting down my expenses I was able to "not continue working", ie, retire. I found out real quick that with all my hobby projects I don't know how I found time to work! I guess I was lucky.