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.