Following from a comment made under my Found in the Hedge post, here's some tractor porn on open display in the little North Yorkshire town of Helmsley. A polite enough place in most seasons, but under that civilised surface surges swollen throbbing diesel lust, if this newsagent's window is to be believed.
More porn below:-
well i'm a sputterin' in shock!! tractor porn on display like, like ... nobody's business. what happened to using plain brown wrapper covers for such lewd nekkid-ness???
ReplyDeleteharumph! i s'pose you men think you can jes sidle inside and thumb through the magazine without even buying !!!
and now, NOW, NOW you go ahead, and pretty as you please, reveal some of the MOST SHOCKING TRACTOR PORN IN HISTORY!!
i'm dazed.
it's all so .... confusing!
shocking!
sleazy!
and i LOVE IT !! ohhh gawd, be still my pulsatin'... errr... heart ?
xxx
rdm
Throbbin metal, Mule, jes' throbbin'.
ReplyDeleteI should post some pics of me on my parents' tractor...yes, they live on a farm and own the real thing, and actually use the dang thing....and now I know something about YOU TWO! How did I not notice? Grit has been my pal for so long, and this developed right under my nose??????
ReplyDeleteJust show me an old 8N Ford. I've never been into all that kinky stuff.
ReplyDeleteCarbide continued: 800 PSI ain't shit! Try doing a search for "hot isostatic press" and see what you find. We actually had to send some small parts that we had sintered to a contractor who "hipped" them at 15,000 psi (at a much lower temperature than we use) in order to clean up a metallurgical problem. Do a search for "sinter hip" and you'll see what we do. Our furnaces all look something like this one:
http://www.avsinc.com/avspdfs/sinterhipcomplete.pdf
The doors weigh more that a Volkswagon (maybe two Volkswagons) and they're held shut with huge lugged locking rings. The pressure chamber and the doors are water cooled and never get uncomfortably hot to the touch during the run. Inside the chamber, a rectangular graphite load box with 2" thick walls is suspended on steel pillars. the ends to the box are also graphite and are attached to the doors so the box is sealed off when you close the door. The loadbox is held together with nuts and bolts machined from graphite. the walls of the loadbox have holes for electrical leads (usually six or eight) and thermocouple probes (maybe a dozen). Supported inside the loadbox by heavy graphite leads are the heating elements. The leads outside the furnace chamber are made from copper pipe which have cooled water running through them The elements are zig-zag labyrinths cut from flat graphite sheets about 1/4" thick with paths about 2" wide and maybe an inch spacing between paths. The elements surround the top, bottom, and sides but not the ends. The elements on the bottom are smaller to make room for graphite pillers which support a graphite frame with graphite rollers which run on graphite axles. Lots of graphite in a carbide furnace! Anyway, the rollers are there to facilitate the loading of the graphite load plate which is 16" x 36" x about 1.5" thick depending on the size of the furnace. We have some furnaces with long enough loadboxes to load load a plate this size from each end. Anyway, we used to lay our rod blanks on 12" x 16" grooved graphite plates, coated with finer graphite (a sprayed slurry of graphite and water which is dried in an oven and has to be reapplied after each furnace run. (The coating keeps the parts from sticking to the plates and needs to be "just right" to keep from causing free carbon or eta phase. Plate coating is it's own science!) The plates are stacked on the loadplate seperated by graphite spacers. These old-school graphite plates were about 1/2" thick and quite heavy, often several times heavier than the parts that were on them. It costs money to heat heavy graphite plates up to 1440 degrees centigrade day after day so finally they threw down for some carbon fiber plates that were about 3/16" thick, very strong, and very light. Six hundred dollars each times several thousand seems like a lot of money until you start calculating the increase in furnace capacity you get by sintering parts instead of sintering heavy plates. My lower back especially loves the carbon plates! Anyway, the furnace cycle basically consists of a vacuum dewax, maybe a hyrdogen burnoff or methane carbon correction (I think we've pretty much done away with this step by controlling the process better), a soak at sintering temperature, a soak under HIP, and then a cooldown. It takes 23 hours or so. The coolest furnace problem I've witnessed was when a thermocouple probe popped out while the furnace was under HIP. It sounded like a B-1 bomber with the inboard afterburners lit. My ass was heading for the door! By the time all that argon vented out the loadbox had exploded inside the chamber and the 3/16" inch or so thermocouple port had torched out to about an inch. My ears rang for two days!
This is quite possibly the longest paragraph I've ever written. Cheers!
~Dave