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.]