What is big and heavy and red all over? Find out what we are moving now.
To make way for a new exhibit and to help Sydney’s Open Hearth Park display its steel-making past, we are loaning them a 10-ton ingot mould. What is an ingot mould? How did we remove it from the middle of our exhibit gallery and send it on its way to Sydney? See the photo gallery for the answers.
Here a ladle (bucket) moves over a row of ingot moulds in the Sydney steel plant, pouring molten steel into their open tops. Once the steel cools, the moulds are lifted off with a crane, leaving an ingot. An ingot is a chunk of steel that gets processed further into steel products, such as railway rails, wire, nails and locomotive axles.
This is the ingot mould we are loaning to the Open Hearth Park on display in our exhibit. The park is on the site of the former Sydney steel plant. In the past, this plant produced half the steel in Canada.
We moved it after hours through the exhibits with our (yellow) forklift and load skates underneath to help it roll along. All 10 tons!
The next day we rolled it outside. See the green load skates that make it possible to move all that weight. Look at the grooves it left in the pavement!
Next came the lift by crane onto a waiting flatbed truck.
This baby lifted it.
Now it is tied down on the flatbed truck, ready for the 280 km drive to Sydney.
Farewell ingot mould. See you in your new/old home in Sydney.
Visited our ingot mould in May. It is in its new location in the Open Hearth Park, near Sydney Harbour and not far from where it used to hold molten steel.
