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Stories of visits to great manufacturing facilities

adammil1

Titanium
Joined
Mar 12, 2001
Location
New Haven, CT
I thought i would try to start a new thread here like the one on great hardware stores years back which generated lots of great reads where people could post about great manufacturing facilities that they have been thru over the course of their lives/careers.

I have had the privilege of working/visiting a some neat facilities in my career (from large powerplants, to Pratt and Whitney, Sikorsky, Airbus et... )I think the one that was most memorable to me, in terms of size, diversity of work, and overall employee experience was when we were installing a new machine our company made down in Delta's Tech Ops center at Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta.

If you have ever flown into Hartsfield airport when you look out your window you will see the most iconic 1960's era neon sign that says "FLY DELTA JETS" From the air the sign doesn't look like much but up close it is an amazingly massive piece of Americana.

The shifts start at 6am at the TechOps which means that this sign greets you fully lit up as you arrive for the day's work. I was told by the guys working at the plant that the thing consumes so much electricity that back around 9/11 when all the airlines were loosing money it needed to be turned off to save money. When the airline returned to profitability they actually held a formal lighting ceremony that was a great source of pride for all the employees. I can only imagine right now the thing has likely been turned off this year.
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I have always wondered what it must have been to get a tour of some of the great locomotive builders Alco/Baldwin/Lima etc.. of years past or what it must have felt like to walk thru the PRR's shops at Altoona. The trip to Delta TechOps is probably the closest modern day equivalent one can find.

The facility is enormous and employs over 10,000 people who work their repairing every part of the aircraft. Work ends there around 3:00 or so I think and after we were done for the day one of the plant mechanics who we were working with asked if we wanted a tour of the facility. We walked around the plant for about 3hrs and I am told we still didn't get to see more than about 30% of the facility.

If you ever get the chance to visit the plant mechanic is the guy you want giving you a tour around the facility, these guys are on call whenever one of the various machines, test stands, or any other piece of equipment in that facility goes down so they know the place really well.

They have shop that specializes in repairing every last part that exists on the aircraft. We went thru their machine shops where massive lathes were truing up bearing surfaces on turbines. Thru the hangers with magnificent Boeing 777's in for overhaul.

The shop was locked for the day and we weren't able to get in but the place is so comprehensive in what they can do that they even do hot drop forging of replacement parts onsite. Having never seen hot drop forging in person this was something I really wanted to see but unfortunately we weren't able to get in.

I wish I was able to take pictures of all the different stuff we saw along the way. The heavy engine overhaul was a site to see but what stood out for me was just all the little shops like the one we delivered our equipment to each one with 20-40specilaized test stands each specializing in testing/rebuilding a different part of the airplane. Each of these little shops tended to employ 10-30 dedicated craftsman who each specialized in repairing their little piece of the aircraft. A lot of pride goes into that line of work when you know millions of people's lives each year will depend on the work you do.

I tried searching and I did find this website that had some photos if you would like to see them;
5 Things I’ll Never Forget From Delta’s TechOps Wonderland

The other major thing too that stuck out to me unlike any other facility I have ever been to was the qualty/pride and employee morale. Delta apparently treats their guys very well and most of the people I worked with had been there 20-40yrs.

I had the weekend off while I was down there and visited the Delta museum. Something I thought that was really neat was the airplane the Spirt of Delta. Here's an article I found on it How Delta Employees Bought The Airline A Boeing 767 - Simple Flying. Short part of the story was in 1982 the airline industry hit a massive recession and all the major carriers were laying off employees. Delta pledged to keep everyone on no matter the cost and out of appreciation the employees donated money to buy the company an airplane! I thought it was a pretty neat story and one of the old timers in the shop we were working in proudly told us about how the contribution everyone made was rather significant like ($2000 in today's money) but that they all did it because they felt as though the airline was a part of their family almost. Never in my career have I seen anything like that before.

As a side note I believe Delta is the only airline left in America that does their own maintenance on any large scale. I know United does some work in San Francisco and American does some in Oklahoma but I don't think anyone is on the scale of what Delta does. Most of them just swap parts off the plane and I hear nowadays many of the other airlines even fly their airplanes to China for overhaul and repair.

This thread is not meant to be an advertisement for Delta but after spending about 4weeks working down there with these guys I always go out of my way to fly Delta and recommend them to everyone I talk to. It kind of makes me sad to think how hard of a time those guys must be going thru down there right now with the current state of the airline industry. I hope they can bounce back soon.

So anyhow I am not the best of story tellers here but I hope you may have enjoyed. I am looking forward to hearing what other great facilities people have been thru.
 
I was able to "tour" the Schott Glass werks in Jena Germany, and also the plant in Wilkes-Barre Scranton PA.

Impressive infrastructure, but both were "shut down" with all production routed to Asia.

I found that sad for both, and all.
 
As a service tech most of my life I have been to many manufacturing facility's, sadly most have moved off shore.

Probably the coolest thing I have ever seen takes place in my home state. I service the steel cutting saws for a forging company.
One day I got a chance to see the "Big Hammer" at work. It's a 50,000lb steam driven forging hammer. That's a 50,000lb block of steel on the ram of a huge steam cylinder that is driven down at speed. The operators used a robot type material handler to pull out a massive glowing white hot piece of steel and position it in the bottom die of the press. The upper part of the die is attached to the bottom of the 50,000lb hammer and is bobbing up and down under steam pressure.
The steam hammer operator, who has tremendous skill at operating the machine has a long control stick that is attached to the steam valve via linkages, controls the bobbing mass of the hammer head.
When satisfied that the material is safely in the die he moves the lever and the hammer comes down. POW!!!! It hits with such force that there is a shock wave that hits you and the long steel building resonates.
As he returns the hammer upwards he may stop if the steel forging has jumped in the lower die or he may just pound on it again, sometimes for several hard hits if it hasn't shifted. Each hit sends a shock wave to you.
The steam hammer operators skill is a matter of life and death, if a part "jumps" in the lower die and is not sitting properly it may just get mushed down and ruined if struck or it could be ejected sideways as a high speed projectile. A 300 lb glowing chunk of steel is not easy to dodge as a high speed projectile. There is always a crew to work one of these huge machines so a skilled operator is a must. Each hit has the steel part jumping up in the lower die, it's up to the operator to judge if the part settled correctly.
The forging hammer is several stories tall and is bolted to a reinforced concrete block that goes several stories into a pit. That block sits on a large number of huge coil springs. If I remember correctly the bottom of the pit is 60 feet down.
Without the shock absorbing mass and springs the nearby town would feel a small earth quake on each hit.
When I'm working on one of there saws, I always know when one of the steam hammers is working. Each hit makes the ground move, even from hundreds of yards away.
One day I talked to the operator of the "Big Hammer". He told me that he loves running that machine, as he said, "Whats not to like? Fire, steam and a huge hammer!"

Mr Bridgeport
 
All on a smaller scale-but I'm lucky enough to have been around Gt Barford Power station when it still ran on coal,the old Mini line at Longbridge,Cincinnati Milacron at Biggleswade,and Cosworth Engines at Northampton.
 
My first engineering job was working at a parking meter company that made almost everything in house. It was amazing how some of the big presses would shake the entire building. We outsourced much the smt electronics to a guy who was doing pcba using home-made pick and place machines in an old chicken coop. Cool stuff. Building a pick and place machine back in the 90s was a pretty daunting task.
 
Circa 1967 - 68, a school trip to Ford's Dagenham plant, ...................convinced me I never wanted to work there - or anywhere like it :eek:
 
I got to go through Daimlers Untertürkheim Engine prodution line #5 about ten years ago. Considering it could churn out nearly a million engines a year, I was surprised how relaxed everything was. Fantastic quality assurance system they had implemented. The visual highlight was a robot schrink fitting the balance shaft drive gear on the crank.
 
I interviewed at New Venture Gear in Syracuse ny about 20 years ago. Huge bays with row after row of cnc machines. They made truck and suv transmissions and even took me on a drive on their test range. Fun stuff, but the weather in Syracuse really sucks.
 
2 Things come to mind
Was at a big pour of 110tons of bronze for a big propellor Realy impressive We were allowed up to see the open dome They were closing it and put a burner on it To controle the cooling
Visited the biggest milling machine once when it was almost ready for production Impressive shop with big gears all over the place Big line of pinions lying on the floor
Timelaps van der Wegen - YouTube
 
My dad tells me about visiting the American Bridge Co. plant in Ambridge, PA, back in the 1980s. An employee's father-in-law worked for Reynolds Aluminum, and had contacts to get them inside some areas of the plant that were being decomissioned. One of his memories was an entire bay floor, hundreds of feet long, entirely covered with square hole platen plates. They were used to bend bridge beams by hand.

One of the shop buildings also had upper floors that were constructed of 2x12 timbers, on 2" centers.
 
Years ago i got a tour of the Navy's Empress II 7 megavolt EMP generator barge. The Marx generator was something like 5 decks deep. Got to watch in the control room when the thing was operating. Wild stuff. Don't really know how a lowly university lab technician was even allowed on the thing. Not classified, i guess.
 
Years ago i got a tour of the Navy's Empress II 7 megavolt EMP generator barge. The Marx generator was something like 5 decks deep. Got to watch in the control room when the thing was operating. Wild stuff. Don't really know how a lowly university lab technician was even allowed on the thing. Not classified, i guess.

I read online the Empress was used once, then scrapped. Kinda sad.
 
This brief letter resulted in a nearly four year "visit" to the P&WA plant at 400 main in East Hartford CT - an altogether amazing place then

PandWA Letter.jpg
 
Empess II was definately used more than once. Part of the tour was a couple of final buffering capacitors that had "tracked". These caps were the size of washing machine tubs and one could clearly see the frozen lightning bolt pattern on the surface. I also know that the military has since built much more powerful EMP generators.
 
an altogether amazing place then

I'll agree with John that P&WA was some place. I got to go through the plant the spring of 1970 just before I graduated from college. The machine floor was the largest I have ever been on - seemed to go on forever. The test cells where they could run up the engines were amazing. A lot goes into a test cell that can take a running engine to altitude / temperature. For a mechanical engineer like me it seemed to put forward examples of a lot we had been studying. They showed us the first production JT-9D engine for the first production 747 as it was being readied for shipment to Boeing. Somewhere I still have a tie tac they gave out of that engine. Years later when flying in UH-60 Blackhawks I would sometimes think that the engines came from there.

For size of machine tools during that same time period we went through the old high bay GE machining operation in Schenectady - that old building had three tiers of overhead cranes. Huge vertical boring mills, milling machines and so on. We were told if the top crane - 500ton capacity as I remember - was doing a pick they cleared the building except for those doing the operation. Also went through Watervliet Arsenal where they had lathes that could turn 18' gun tubes for the Navy - first time I ever saw a seat attached for the operator to move along with the cut.

Joe Michaels has a great story about touring Bethlehem Steel as a high school student same time frame when Bethlehem sill made steel.

Four years later I saw the change when I hired on with IBM in Poughkeepsie. Sure not much in the line of machining - but there was some. Back during the Depression the company offered, and some people took, to pay in stock. There was one department in machining that had two or three guys in it - all old timers. Story was that you had to have a million dollars of stock to work in that department. Can't prove it, but a good story that could well have been true. The whole North end of the main buildings was final test of 370 computers - a completely different animal that was a bookend to what I saw four years before.

Dale
 
In 1985 I was working at the Boeing plant in Wichita City which was later bought by Spirit Aerospace. I remember walking down the wing line where wings were being assembled. The wings were up on stands where the assembly mechanics would crawl up inside the wing through small access doors. Whenever a man was inside a wing he would position a sign outside that said "caution - man inside wing". This was in case there was an emergency of some sort, fire or tornado, whatever, that his coworkers would not leave him behind.

They also had a jig bore department there that had a collection of the biggest Pratt and Whitneys and Sips that I have ever seen.

Also a special order Cincinnati Milacron gantry mill that had about 12 feet of Z travel. You could have parked a city bus under the bridge on that one.
 
The Boeing plant in Everett is impressive. It's the largest building in the world by volume. It's also one of the few large factories where the public can take a tour. If you go to the Boeing Museum, they will take you on a tour through the tunnels and up onto the mezzanine to see the production lines. It's not as impressive as walking the floor, but if you don't have a Boeing badge, it's a decent substitute.

I've been lucky enough to work on a variety of Boeing projects, but the Everett plant is hard to beat for sheer scale. It also has the advantage of being built on granite, so machine tools don't tend to move after you install them. A bit further south, at the Renton (737) plant, there is no such luck. The building is on friction pilings, so every time there's an earthquake, the pilings aren't quite in the same place afterwards. This made machine alignment a pain. Luckily this wasn't my problem as I never was on a 737 project.
 
A little different "production" in my career - which was power generation.

I worked at different times at both Canal Electric Company (Sandwich, MA) and at Brayton Point Station (Somerset, MA) Both plants had a Westinghouse "Supercritical" steam cycle which, for those who don't know, utilize water ABOVE the critical point - as in there is no volumetric change for the fluid in its change between water and steam. At pressures above the critical point (3200.1 psi and 705.1 F)there is no "steam" - it's all the same.

A boiler in this type of plant becomes a boiler without a water line. No gauge glass. A simple heat exchanger will do just fine. As the Chief Engineer told me: "Pump for pressure, heat for temperature." Push water in at one end, heat to the temperature you like, then let the fluid/steam go through a turbine.

This was done as a matter of efficiency. Canal Unit 1 had a design heat rate about 8530 Btu/kwhr - which is a thermal efficiency of about 40 percent. Later additions to Canal (like an electrostatic precipitator) lowered that efficiency to about 9700btu/kwhr, about 35 percent thermal. This reduced efficiency was still a full 5 percent better than most of the power plants of that era.

The boiler/heat exchanger did have two "reheats" to bring the temperature of the expanded fluid/steam back into a range for best use by the turbine. Add another level of complexity forced by supercritical steam.

Canal Unit 1 was a plant which for normal operation had a feed pump directly connected to the main turbine. This connected through a hydraulic clutch. Brayton Point was a plant which for normal operation relied on an "auxiliary feed pump turbine," itself large enough to power a 10MW generator if it were so used. The Canal feedwater design was by its nature "more efficient" than the Brayton design.

Canal Electric Unit 1 had TWO LP turbines. Brayton Point Unit 3 had THREE LP turbines. And the last stage blades were a little larger. Thus Brayton design here was "more efficient" than the Canal design. As my father said "Brayton Point Unit 3 is a 'big assed' machine."

Between the two differences, the plants were about equal thermally, and Brayton Point only slightly larger size-wise.

Each year Electric Light & Power Magazine would publish the lists of the "Most Efficient" of the nation's power plants. Known then as the "Liar's list." Each year Canal 1 and Brayton 3 would be about neck-and-neck and near the top. Some years Canal would win. Some years Brayton Point would win.

My own experience at Canal was as "performance engineer." My job to trace and track all the btus, check the overall performance of the machinery, and make suggestions on ways to improve performance. This on a machine which was already pretty close to "optimal" thermally - within the constraints of pressure, temperature, and material properties - and money!

Still, I was able to bring Canal Unit 1 to the top position on the Liars List in 1979. A minor feather in a young engineer's cap? But we happened to be at performance peak in a staggered outage plan as opposed to our nemesis at Brayton Point 3. Brayton Point would undergo their major maintenance outage a couple of years later. And then they became the top position. I can claim only being in the right place at the right time.

Today both of those plants have been relegated to non-existent or "standby" service. The proliferation of combined cycle generation, cheap natural gas, the ability to transport gas via high pressure supply, and extension of the networks to make this happen have all caused the demise of the non-combined cycle generation.

IIRC, Canal Electric had 150 employees. We subcontracted a good portion of our work to boiler companies and Westinghouse, but the normal plant shift complement of 7 and a 60 person maintenance crew kept the rest of it under control. This for a total plant capacity about 900MW. Brayton point I can't comment as well, but given a larger plant size, more units, and more variety between units I expect their personnel would have been about 300. This for a total plant capacity about 1600MW.

Today in Portsmouth, NH there is a combined cycle plant of 800MW which is operated with 20 (!) employees on site. They do count on GE to service their equipment totally - and they do plan on annual 60 day outages (which would have been unheard of back in my Canal Electric days - 3 months would have happened once in five years.)

And, given it's a combined cycle plant - one expects a thermal efficiency ABOVE 50 percent - a full 10 percent better than Canal Electric at its very best.

But it also signifies a difference in the way power plants are conceived, designed, built and maintained. In the days of Canal Electric/Brayton a power plant was singular, uniquely designed, built to industry standards certainly, but pretty much a "stand alone" engineering work from beginning to end. Today in the case of Portsmouth, NH the power plant is cookie cutter, repetition of standardized elements, constructed as cheap as possible (a "Butler Building is common) and made "disposable." One buys a power plant today as one buys a car. You shop for the best deal, run and maintain it according to the provider's direction and frequently with their help, and as soon as it becomes too expensive to maintain, you trade it in for something better having made all your investment back in the first two years of ownership.

And - along with the change in power plants has been a change in employment. No need now for the generalist "power plant engineer." Everything is run and maintained according to the manufacturer's direction. Most on site generation staff have no specific knowledge of what makes it tick or why - and no need to know since the Owner's Manual tells them everything they need to know to hold their job.

Brayton Point Power Station - Wikipedia
Power Plant Quietly Changes Hands | Sandwich News | capenews.net

I'm a dinosaur. But now at 65, my day is done and I leave it all for others.

They call it progress.

Joe in NH
 
I got to make the turned and knurled handle for a steel hammer in 8th grade, using a 9" South Bend. I immediately got a $50 Sears AA 6" lathe to learn on at home. That was in 1954. In 1955, we took a trip East. In Bethlehem, PA, an uncle worked for the steel company and took my father and me on a tour. We saw blast furnaces and huge glowing ingots from a distance, but I was most impressed by a metal lathe making very long steel parts, maybe ship propellor shafts. The operator sat up high on the carriage, at the top of a ladder. The chips were very big, but they still looked just like the chips I made at home. I understand the blast furnaces are still standing, but just as decoration for a gambling casino.

In 1963, a friend with a car took a couple of us from Ann Arbor to Dearborn, MI to take the free tour of the Ford Rouge plant. We saw the remains of Henry's obsession with total control of raw material to finished goods. There was still a steel mill converting ore to sheet steel. And, at the end of the tour, we got to the guys adjusting the fit of car doors just before driving off the end of the line. It was a very long tour and worth every step. These days, you can pay to tour the Rouge, but I think it is just a video followed by a walk along a balcony overlooking assembly of pickup trucks. I have not bothered to do it, even when they do the free for Ford museum members days.

While working for International Truck in the engineering department, I had access to the plant across the road whenever I wished to see something made or pick up a part for a test vehicle. The forge shop was huge and fun to watch. I once took the Stuart Turner model steam hammer I had made at home into the forge shop foreman's office and they hooked it up to an air line and flattened some solder. It did not work nearly as well as the big ones, but looked cool. There was an axle and transmission operation with gear making and heat treat. Gleason hypoid gear cutters, broaches, centerless grinders, drills, shot blasters and skilled workers everywhere. The iron castings came from a company foundry in Wisconsin that I never visited. Of course, the main Fort Wayne plant buildings were the truck assembly areas. The plant has been closed down for decades and even the engineering operation closed and moved to Illinois a while after I retired.

I got to tour the International, Cummins and Caterpillar diesel engine plants several times, along with various suppliers' radiator, charge air cooler, heater core, cooling fan and fan clutch factories. I visited two of the other International truck assembly plants. While we were building Scouts with Nissan engines, I arranged a private tour of the Nissan truck plant in Ageo, Japan while I was on a vacation trip in 1976. They built a great product. Their assembly plant sounded (air tools) and smelled (new tires) just like the ones back home. But our trucks rolled off the final test dynamometer and out to a parking lot, ready for delivery. It was left to the selling dealer or customer to find defects. Nissan trucks rolled off the line and drove to a separate large building with a line as long as their assembly line where dozens of workers inspected every aspect of each finished truck. Then they parked them. As I said, they built a great product.

Larry
 
Joe,

The large coal fired utility plants are quite the facilities to see. I started my career working in them back in 2008. Back then natural gas was at $14/mmBTU and the break even price with coal was at $2/mmBTU. At that time all the coal fired power plants in this country were going like crazy, coal was over 50% of our power generation and things looked great for the utility industry. The election that year, and then the invention of fracking turned things upside down. Every so often I have googled the plants I worked in and most of them come up as shut down.

The neat one was Eddystone built on the old site of the defunct Baldwin Locomotive works back in the 1950's that plant I believe was the first ever supercritical plant they ever built. It had a primary "boiler" and a secondary "reheat boiler" which were each self standing units. Main steam pressure was 5200psi if I recall correctly. I am not 100% sure if that was the design or if that was what they ran at. It was the first ever supercrtical plant and they learned a lot from it and never made one again quite the same way as that plant.

Being inside a working plant is a sight to see in and amongst itself but the more impressive thing to be onsite for is a big plant outage. It is as though the circus has came to town at the plant. Probably a good 500men wind up showing up in town to work on those projects. The hotels in town all compete to offer the best outage perks. Many of them provide off shift meal/room services for the guys working second and 3rd shifts and the number of trades that come in and machinery that is brought to the site is impressive.

Some of the sites I saw were impressive to say the least. One plant was getting rid of an old electrostatic precipitator and replacing it with a full blown wet scrubber and baghouse. They brought in what looked to by a standard Caterpillar hydraulic excavator with the longest boom I had ever seen made by a company Sneebogan or something Scandinavian. They mounted the largest pinching shears on that thing and I recall watching during breaks that thing munching steel several stories up in the air.

The other fun one was when a contractor brought onsite a brand new Liebherr hydraulic crane. It still had shipping labels in english/german sitting on the side of it. The thing had one of the largest booms I had ever seen and would reach up and over the whole power house to drop in new superheater elements right thru the roof of the plant. The top of the powerhouse boiler had to be at least 250ft off the ground and the panels may have been a good 40ft or so so that boom must have been 300ft high or so but I won't ever know. At any rate the operator would just effortlessly pick up these super heater panels and almost silently gracefully bring them up and overhead where they would be dropped into the boiler and disappear from site. I assume there must have been a camera on the headache ball and some good communication as the operator was otherwise flying blind. That was some neat stuff to watch.

Something else neat, one one of the sites I was on Continental Field Services showed up. Years ago one of their lead machinists used to post here a lot about the world of field machining but I got to see some of their portable boring bars at work inside of the steam turbines. Talk about an interesting line of machining.

The sounds of the outages up in the boiler house were also something to hear. All air arc gouging, going on and welders everywhere. I wonder what has happened to some of the Unions I used to see on site. Boilermakers, pipefitters etc... I wonder if they still have all the work that they used to do. I did a lot of work in the area represented by the Philadelphia unions. At the time in 2008 the area was full of Coal fired power plants and tons of refineries. I believe some of the refineries are now shut and most of the coal plants too. It must be pretty bad these days for those trades, hopefully there is other equipment for them to work on?

On one job I was a field engineer right out of college working for at the time Alstom power (the company who took over Combustion Engineering who made the boilers) surveying the roof of the Eddystone power plant. They had neglected the plant and the result was that flue gases got up into areas where they shouldn't have. Big wideflange beams 36" high you could crawl thru some of them they were so deteriorated in places. Our job was to survey the damage and report back to engineering in Chattanooga where a structural engineer was to crunch the numbers and tell them what needed to be replaced and what had enough remaining life in it. The Boilermaker foreman handed me a needle scaler and asked if I knew how to use it. I told him yes and having volunteered on steam locomotive restoration project that wasn't an issue. Pretty soon I felt a shadow emerge and I turned around to see some of the biggest most intimidating boilermakers I ever saw hovering over me and asking why I thought it was a good idea to touch tools on their site. I told them that Joe the foreman asked me to help and they quickly called Joe over. Joe tells them that the union hall is out of guys between this project and several refinery projects. He tells them that the plant has only given Alstom one day onsite to work as some in management figure what damage they don't see can't hurt them and that every hour we worked we were finding hundreds of manhours of work for the trades to rebuild. He pointed to each of the X's our lead structural engineer had spray painted and explained how much work we were generating. After that when it dawned on the union guys how much work we were creating for them we became almost part of the team. They invited us to hang out with them during lunch and we all got along real well.

At any rate I got displaced from the power industry and eventually found my way into making custom machinery and find that to be a lot more fun. It has taken me thru some neat facilities, most of them aerospace related where I have seen some neat stuff. Fortunately while we have lost so much other heavy industry over the years the USA still seems to be a leading player in Aerospace. I just hope like hell we get this Covid 19 crap behind us ASAP as it is really doing a number right now on any facility that isn't working for the military.

By the way Peter from Holland, what machinery uses gears of the size you posted there? Biggest stuff I can think of is Hydro electricity. Are there that many super large dams being built? I wonder what the call is for that sized equipment and where gears that big are used?

When I worked for Alstom they had just converted the old Combustion Engineering boiler drum shop to be one of the world's largest machine shops for making large steam turbines for the nuclear renaissance that never came to fruition. Steam turbines for the nuclear industry tend to be a lot larger than those for coal plants as they run lower pressure and they had lathes that could swing the largest of them. Sadly GE closed the facility not much after it was opened when they bought up Alstom. Here's a link to the auction brochure I could find. https://www.thebranfordgroup.com/sales/GETN1216/AlstomBrochure.pdf no mention of the large lathes and HBM's, but I did find this photo of the Waldrich Seigen lathe they had there. I never saw that facility when we toured Chattanooga when I worked for Alstom as they were still building it
Waldrich Seigen.JPG
 








 
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