Thread: Mesta Machine Company photos

I have a 1919 catalogue from this company, it is a large hardbound book of 127 pages, packed with great photos of a wide range of heavy equipment. Here are a few pages. It looks like some of them have been touched up - especially the floor and some castings.

"Plant and Product of the Mesta Machine Company, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania"

Starting in the Forge Department - actually there are three forge departments. No.1 has hand forges and small steam hammers, No.2 has two 1,500-ton steam-hydraulic forging presses, No.3 has one 1,000-ton and one 2,000 ton steam hydraulic forging presses. Here is the 2,000 tonner in Forge Department No.3:



Here is Forge Department No.2 showing the two 1,500 ton presses. I think the forgings in the second row back might be ship shafts. Not sure what the curious items are in the left foreground.



Here is the Ship Shaft Department, I have included it here to show what I think must be the forgings from the previous photo. The process described is:

1 Starts in the acid open hearth steel department where forged ingots are made.
2 Ingots go to Forge Department No.2 to be forged.
3 Forgings go to heat treating plant, also tested here.
4 Forgings go to the finishing department "equipped with the heaviest class of motor-driven machine tools".
5 Shafts go to the assembling department for complete line shaft assembly on permanent accurately aligned pedestals. The shafts are set up in their own bearings and have their flange bolt holes reamed. Maximum variation over entire length is within + or - .003".

Mesta says the department was set up to fill an urgent need in WW1 and that they supplied the complete shafting for the first 180 ships built at the Hog Island plant of the United States Shipping Board amongst other large contracts:





Here is one from the Iron Foundry where castings from medium size up to 125 tons are poured. Large concrete pits are built in the floor, in these the molds are made. Provision is made for bolting the cope to the top of the mold. The molds are dried in place with natural gas. Air furnaces are used for melting the cast iron - there are seven of these furnaces with a capacity of 200 ton in total, all can be used at the same time if necessary:

Note the recesses in this gas engine casting for the "dog bones" (is that the term?) for joining this bed to its mate.

There was another Mesta link a while back......
But I didn't see these , I don't think.?

Thanks Muchly

M1M

More Mesta photos, please!

I've always been curious about that manufacturer.

Mike

Hi Peter,
The three strange looking things in the left of the forge photograph, look very like "cuddies" slang for horses, , Really stands to support the ends of forgings, during operations in the forge, Where i worked we had extremely heavily constructed wooden ones
Nice photos, Any chance of more? The heavy turning shop was nice, and the casting, is a work of art.

The Mesta complex is about 10 miles from where I live. I go past it all the time. At one time I believe it was the largest machine shop with the biggest machines in the world. They manufactured rolling mills and provided machine shop service to the Pittsburgh area steel mills. The mills went down in the early 1980's and Mesta closed and sold out shortly there after. The facility was sold to Whemco which makes steel mill rolls. I am not sure but I think the equipment was liquidated. When the steel mills closed in the 1980's this area lost over 250,000 jobs between the mill jobs and support companies like Mesta. Right next to Mesta was US Steels Homestead Works which lost 25,000 jobs. The only things left are some smoke stacks and 2 blast furnaces that they are trying to turn into a museum. I lost my job at J&L Aliquippa Works in 1983. It had 10,000 people and the plant was over 7 miles long. The list goes on and on. The Pittsburgh area has never recovered from the decline of the steel industry here. Now you have a hard time finding skilled trades workers here.

More Mesta pictures: http://images.library.pitt.edu/m/mest/

Originally Posted by cutting oil Mac

Hi Peter,
The three strange looking things in the left of the forge photograph, look very like "cuddies" slang for horses, , Really stands to support the ends of forgings, during operations in the forge, Where i worked we had extremely heavily constructed wooden ones
Nice photos, Any chance of more? The heavy turning shop was nice, and the casting, is a work of art.

That makes sense, they probably put a piece of timber in the slot to protect the work.

I also have a copy of that book. It is out of copyright and I plan to reprint it at some point in the future along with a 1904 United Engineering & Foundry book that is very similar to the Mesta Book.

Cutting Oil Mac & Mudflap,
That makes sense - I was thinking those mystery objects were too fragile to use as horses, but I guess most weight would be directly downwards through a piece of timber, and not be applied to the thin edges.

------------------

Staying with the foundry, here are a few more.

This shows the main aisle of the foundry, 80 feet wide and 1200 feet long, with 60 foot aisles on both sides extending the full length. The right hand side aisle contains the brass foundry and all of the melting furnaces. The left hand aisle has the molding floor for small castings, core department and drying ovens:



This shows the Roll Foundry, the largest of its type in the USA. Rolls can be made from iron or steel. The iron rolls are sand cast and chilled, with iron supplied by seven air furnaces ranging from 15 to 40 tons capacity. Steel rolls are poured from four acid open hearth furnaces ranging in capacity from 40 to 50 tons. Concrete pits are sunk into the floor, up to 30 feet deep.



Second floor of the Pattern Department. The roof trusses and roof are steel with covered with concrete to make the area fireproof. A platform extends out from the pattern department into the main foundry. Patterns can be moved out onto this platform and there lifted directly by the overhead cranes and taken to the place where they will be used:



Here is a pattern for a large gas engine:

Moving away from the heat, dust and noise of the foundry, here are some photos from the Machine Shop.

The Machine Department is made up of three aisles 60, 40 and 25 feet wide all 1000 feet long, and a couple more aisles 60 and 25 feet wide by 460 feet long. Overhead cranes up to 100 tons.

The surface plate shown in this photo is located at one end of the main aisle, it is 60 feet wide by 160 feet long, made of cast iron, accurately machined and grouted in concrete. The surface plate is very accurately leveled, varying by only a few thou over its entire surface. Large casting are set up here and portable machine tools are brought into use, several machines being able to work on one casting at the same time.



I am not sure what this engine is, but the "centre crank" engines (ie crank arms and main bearings each side of the crankpin) were only used on Gas Engines and Reversing Engines according to the catalogue. Those look like Corliss valve cylinders nearby, but may be unrelated to the large engine bed plate being machined.

Any ideas - are they facing the end of the bed plate, or boring the trunk guide surfaces? I guess the former.



Here is a main shaft for a crankshaft being machined, 32 inch diameter. Holes are bored through the centre of shafts to know if there are any defects, also piston rods of large gas and steam engines are hollow bored to reduce weight. The sequence with piston rods is to rough machine and bore, then heat treat and test, then finish machine on finishing lathes.



This shows a built up crank shaft for a large engine, I am guessing a gas engine due to the "centre crank" and provision for flywheel. It might be an illusion, but it looks like the main shaft goes right through the two crank arms, presumably to be cut out later as described by Cutting oil mac in another post. I think those grooves in the main shaft are for oiling (detailed in a drawing Rick posted elsewhere).

Here is the erecting department, the main aisle being 60 feet wide by 460 feet long. The overhead crane here is 36 feet above the fllor, but in an auxillary department there are double-deck cranes with 50 feet clearance between floor and upper runway to allow vertical engine, presses etc to be assembled. Examples are given of some quick delivery times; a 409 ton blowing engine delivered in 45 days and a 227 ton mill engine in 30 days. A large reversing engine crankshaft was delivered in 10 days (maybe for that big Mesta at Republic which had an equally big appetite for crankshafts!)



What it was all about: five Mesta Single Tandem Gas Blowing engines at work. I am guessing the crankshaft shown above would have suited engines like this:



The Roll Turning Department, made up of two departments, Roughing and Finishing. In the Roughing department there are ten lathes. Sinkheads can be removed and test cuts taken to check the roll. In the Finishing Department there are 19 Mesta Roll Turning Lathes, also other machine tools including grinders for finishing the rolls. These curious lathes were discussed in another thread a while back:



There are quite a few different flywheel types built. I think this Pit Lathe has a large face plate behind the spokes, you can see were the flywheel is presumably taking its drive from this face plate.

I think what you are seeing in that crank picture is an illusion. That would be the end of the crankshaft that you see.

Moving on to the Gear Cutting Department, this shows a 20 foot vertical boring mill at work, larger gears are turned on a pit lathe. All machinery in the gear cutting department was built by Mesta Machine Co. I am guessing those teeth are as-cast, and will be taken to full depth on the Gear Planer seen in the second photo below.



Mesta claim their patented design of gear cutting machine is different than others - the gear remains stationary (instead of oscillating) and the cutting tool alone moves.



Apparently this large bevel gear is for a continuous mill drive. Such gears are cast from steel (or alloy steel)



This shows machine molded gears, ie unmachined teeth:

Here is an explanation of the Machine Molded gears. They claim it is more accurate than using a pattern. It seems like a simple way of making molds, once you have the machine, that is.
I wonder how the forming tool actually makes it imprint in the sand. I would have thought simply pressing into the sand would deform the last tooth? Anyone seen this process?

Peter

I’m not sure how Mesta’s method differs from earlier types, but in those the normal practice with machine moulded gears was to set the short sector of the tooth pattern in place, and to fill the space with sand and ram it up against the pattern. The sand would often be strengthened with nails, and holes would be made for venting. Sounds like very delicate work. Of course there would also be all the usual problems of distortion and shrinkage to contend with. These would be much greater with steel gears than with cast iron (and it was much more difficult to get a good surface finish with steel).

Has anyone bought one of the various modern reprints of this book? They can be had quite inexpensively. I was wondering if they're any good, particularly the photo quality.

-Ryan

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