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Show Steei worker has language all his own The way steelmen at Geneva Works talk about the kitchen and diets you'd think they were either henpecked or self-conscious. self-conscious. But they aren't discussing homemaking they're talking steelmaking. Their "kitchen" is the section of open hearth steelmaking furnaces containing contain-ing much of the control equipment equip-ment necessary to produce quality steel. There's no caloric counting in their diet talk either. These discussions center around the carefully measured amounts of coke, limestone and iron ore that are dumped into the top of the blast furnace to produce hot ironone of the most important im-portant steps of steelmaking. Steel mills have bells that never ring and aren't supposed suppos-ed to and grizzlies that aren't bears. Each unit or organization, by virtue of the kind of work it does, soon develops a vocabulary vocabu-lary all its own. The "shop talk" steelmakers use contains some of the most interesting and colorful language in modern mod-ern American industry. The non-ringing bells are giant steel cones, some as large as 15 feet in diameter, which hold charged coke, limestone lime-stone and iron ore before dumping them into the body of a blast furnace. And a grizzly Simply a device used for coarse separation separa-tion or screening of ores. Don't run for the hills if you hear someone at the plant mention "snakes." That's only a way to describe any crooked surface defect in a steel plate. You've probably thought of steel as something without feeling. feel-ing. But, when' steelman talk about it, you might hear that it suffers from "fatigue," at "ages," is handicapped by "shortness," and sometimes steel must undergo the "fracture "frac-ture test." This type of lingo refers to the physical properties proper-ties or make-up of the steel. In addition if you literally believed some of the terms they use, you'd assume that, steel was the most tortured of metals and that the men who worked with it were Machiavellian Machia-vellian monsters. After steel is made, they might blaze it, crop it, pickle it, cross Toll it, etch it, anneal it, kill it, hammer it, shear it, quench it, stretch it, slab it. |
