Homemade Steam Engine & Gold Stamper

[Jim Dobson]

Homemade Steam Engine & Gold Stamper
TTB02 By the late Trevor Woolan

[SwarfnStuff]

Thanks for showing, Memory lane activated as I grew up not far from mines and stampers. (Near Bendigo central Victoria Australia.)

We knew them as batterys, guess because the really battered the rocks into fine sand.

I cannot remember seeing them working up close but the noise level was horrendous.

Big memory was sitting out front of Grandma's house watching the bailing buckets going up and down just across the road. The water ran down an open drain and I recall very smelly.

Nice model to see running. Multiply the noise of the stampers by (LOTS) to imagine the real things.
John B

[Jim Dobson]

Thanks for showing, Memory lane activated as I grew up not far from mines and stampers. (Near Bendigo central Victoria Australia.)

We knew them as batterys, guess because the really battered the rocks into fine sand.

I cannot remember seeing them working up close but the noise level was horrendous.

Big memory was sitting out front of Grandma's house watching the bailing buckets going up and down just across the road. The water ran down an open drain and I recall very smelly.

Nice model to see running. Multiply the noise of the stampers by (LOTS) to imagine the real things.
John B

Thanks John, I've always enjoyed looking at these relics on travels through Oz.
I certainly think that the operators would have suffered hearing loss in a very short amount of time.

[SwarfnStuff]

True about the hearing loss.
I worked in textiles as a dyer. One mill I was at was a vertical one. Scouring, carding, spinning weaving dyeing etc to the finished article.
A visit to the weaving room with the old Dob-cross looms where I think the noise was near the 140Db.
Loom operators basically were really good at lip reading as the shuttles were belted back and forth across the loom crashing into the thingies (Technical term  ) that caught them before flinging them back to the other side.
I reckon the stampers would be WAY higher given we could hear them thumping from home, a mile or so away.
Cheers,John B

[Jim Dobson]

140Db....jeez that's like having your ears next to a rifle barrel all day long!

[SwarfnStuff]

Yeah Jim, Really really loud BUT the 140Db is just my guess. I do know that the dye-house open steam sparge pipes that heated the die-bath was 85Db at some point during the heating phase.

If you think of a kettle heating you might recall the change in tone / volume changes closer to the boil. Well, our "kettles" held 1000kg of wool and about 3000 litre of water.

We could gauge from the sound when to throttle the steam back to prevent an over enthusiastic boil. Later, instrumental control took over the by guess heating cycle.
I'm now waffling, but the looms were much much louder.
End waffle,
John B

[Jim Dobson]

A lot of these industries have gone the way of the wooden bucket maker.
My family was in the tanning business and had a tannery that went for 132 years before finally closing.