I grew up near a steelworks. Guys I used to go to school with would tell me horror stories of near-misses with cobbles. Once you start rolling a billet, the speed increases inversely to the cross-section. By the time the’re down to rod-size, that stuff is bookin’.
4 Likes
Was “This Guy” even supposed to be there? No helmet, office clothes…
Detention with the Health & Safety guys!
2 Likes
I spent extended stretches in a couple of steel mills back when I was doing factory inspections for the EPA (and when we still had lots of steel mills). The workers had (or put on) a very relaxed attitude about working around things that completely terrified me. Not just the red glowy things pretty much everywhere, but the open leaking vats of pickle liquor, the thick smoke in the air all the time, and the guys whose idea of a prank is pushing a vending machine over a rail right in front of you.
4 Likes
In the last video, that ribbon of hot metal is neatly laying itself in loops more easily than I can loop a freaking garden hose. That just pisses me off.
13 Likes
The first 30 seconds was the best part. So peaceful!
2 Likes
Entropy is why we can’t have nice things.
8 Likes
You are probably right about this. That effect is even better with no IR filter at all. A friend once removed IR filter from a cheap webcam, and we viewed hot(400 deg. C) soldering iron through it. It was glowing on camera image, and not at all when viewed directly.
3 Likes
Just between “Sweating your balls/tits off” and “Hotter than fuck”?
I agree.
It went from “How its made” to “Worst Engineering Disasters” pretty quick.
7 Likes
Ha! It really does. I confess I didn’t think anything but “Turn it off turn it off turn it off! Why isn’t anyone turning it off?!”
2 Likes
2 Likes
Jet fuel must have been a factor in its state. I hear jet fuel can’t melt steel beams. Also, don’t toss water bottles into molten steel:
7 Likes
They probably got the fucking new guy to do that…
4 Likes
…and now they need another new guy
7 Likes
I used to work in a foundry during university holidays, and when I first turned up one of the large sheds over a furnace was being repaired to replace an absent roof. The explanation I was given was the old iron scrap castings were being melted down, and some had been left outside in a pile in the rain. They were supposed to be checked for water pockets, but weren’t, and the roof was taken off in a ejection (and then shower) of molten iron.
But it paid for a student’s beer, so it was worth it.
3 Likes
Don’t forget that workers who get close to the steel also need to wear heavy coats to avoid being burnt from the radiant heat. I made a choice to work hard and get a job in the coal mines, rather than the steelworks. That’s actually 100% true.
4 Likes
It’s a 22 mile race. Human are very good endurance runners and deal better with heat than horses, so the human wins have been in unusually warm years.
2 Likes
but the open leaking vats of pickle liquor
aka vats of powerful acid. Yikes!
2 Likes
I would at that point emit a brown rope of my own.
5 Likes
It was crazy. Though already 7 years old at that point, OSHA was still in its infancy, so there were few workplace safety rules in effect (and when we went to factories as EPA inspectors we went to great efforts to make sure they knew we weren’t OSHA, since shop foremen at some factories were under instruction to make life hell for OSHA inspectors). I think the only thing keeping steelworker injury levels manageable was the strong union, which had negotiated some important safety rules – rules which the fatcats said made US mills noncompetitive. They might have been right, but so what?
(Incidentally, on one inspection we found that excess pickle liquor at one now-closed factory got surreptitiously flushed into the regular water runoff, and eventually into Lake Erie, at 2AM every day or two.)
4 Likes
One other thing to consider besides the heat…
That steel rod is not only hot, but at least a few inches in diameter, and looks to be at least 20 feet up in the air.
You may not survive that sort of mass whipping onto you despite the temperature.
3 Likes
