The Last Machine, Part 4

NEXT SLIDE TALKS: 
"Brass Valley: The Fall of an American Industry"
Nov. 3 @ 6:30 PM - Two Roads Brewery, Stratford, CT, for CT Trust for Hist Pres
Nov. 14, 7:30 PM at Newtown Public Library for Newton Hist.Soc.

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: This summer was full of photographs, but we returned to the last machine too late! Pieces of the “coil basket conveyer,” lay at the end of the shed waiting for the hauler, and if the “walking beam transfer rack” was there, it was unrecognizable to me. The control consoles, furnaces and other machinery had been cleared to the front end of the shed. Where previously it had been too tight to make pictures, there was now space to turn the large fork lifts that Art and Ben would use as they began the dismemberment of the long body of the extrusion press. Art and Ben would start at the back, called “The Bottle” that held the hydraulic cylinder (The Last Machine #1), and finish at the face that once extruded metal rod in infinite lengths.

For the first time we saw it without its drab raincoat. If I stress too strongly that it struck me as sphynx-like people might question my sanity, but in time I wasn’t alone in calling it, “The Cat.” Whatever the beast that hunched there at the back of the shed, it weighed a half million pounds according to the engineering parts list, and it wasn’t going anywhere quickly.

I’d learned that torch cutting makes for fireworks pictures. I asked if there would be fireworks pictures. A half million pounds of extrusion press made that a foolish question.

[This series, “The Last Machine” records the story and demolition of the largest extrusion press in New England, a massive machine which is currently being dismembered and scrapped at the old American Brass property in Ansonia on the site of Anson Phelps original brass mill there.]

The Last Machine, Part 3

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: In the extrusion shed, the row of machine shops (previous photo) received most of our photographic attention, though the giant extrusion press, “the last machine.” was like nothing we had ever seen, and we never really saw it. Always wrapped in black plastic and crowded in by furnaces and other machinery, it remained a Sphynx-like mystery. I photographed reluctantly and without conviction until I knew it would be gone.

An extrusion press squeezes molten metal the way a toothpaste tube squeezes toothpaste. The WWII extruder in Waterbury, which we photographed in operation, may be the central “character” of my book, but it was a minnow beside this whale. I was told this machine could extrude metal rod, “in infinite lengths.” All we could see beneath the plastic were the partially exposed haunches that squatted above a deep, wet cavity, accessed by stairs, too dark to photograph and too raunchy to tempt exploration. In front of the Beast were vast beds and a racetrack of coils; they were two distinct systems to which it once spewed its infinite rod. The plans refer to these as the “walking beam transfer rack” and the “coil basket conveyer.” They made good pictures but seemed incomplete without the machine that fed them.

The rest of the vast shed was empty, though the plans  show it was once populated with pickling tanks, wire machines, something called a “Vaughn Block,” and four large “Schumags,” (drawing machines, I believe) with pointers. It is a newish shed built onto older structures sometime after the aerial map of 1921. Its empty newishness made it, of all the sheds on the property, the place we photographed least until this July.  These pictures were taken much earlier. I had no idea the dismemberment of all this would provide a photographic spectacle like fireworks.

The Last Machine, Part.2 - "The Lady Chair"

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: The story of the largest extrusion press in New England, “the last machine," is still mostly unknown to me. The press was always there when Lazlo Gyorsok and I began photographing in the casting shop on the same Anaconda American Brass property in Ansonia in 2011. The casting house was our primary interest, but in the long periods between pours, we’d explore the other buildings of the property, all silent and decaying. And so, from time to time, we’d shoot in the extrusion mill. There were many wonderful things to photograph there in machinists' bays along an ancient back wall that may have been built in 1845, when Anson Phelps built his own Ansonia Brass & Copper here. That was when he built the canal and industrial village that founded Ansonia. 

Unfortunately, the rest of this shed was newer, difficult to shoot, and uninspiring, but I wish I could go back and photograph that hall of idle machine bays when it looked like this.