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mainly, hardly good for thirty bushels of corn per acre, and which, with ordinary improvements, being seven miles from a railroad, would not have sold for $35.00 per acre.

Developments have extended to the north and northwest into eastern Oblong and western Robinson townships, with some wild catting in the vicinity of Robinson, which has not so far proved valuable, although there are indications of oil, and oil in very light quantities. It is thought oil may be found here in the deep sand, but salt water, which is reached at from 900 to 1,000 feet has been a detriment to the work. In the southwest part of the County, in Honey

Creek township, some good wells were drilled in late in the fall, and work is expected lively there in the spring and early summer. One well in that section when shot showed 100 barrels per hour natural. A bonus of $16,000 and a sixth of the oil was given for a lease of 500 acres in this same township.

There is some land yet in what is considered fair territory that is not leased, and in some places, rather remote, favorable terms of lease can be had for blocks and parts of farms, where it is desired to secure development, but people are taking them rapidly and the whole of this section will soon be covered by lease or purchase.

Dawn

The first gray streaks of dawn but show
The world yet sadder than before,
As hill and tree and homestead grow
Wan phantoms in the morning glow.

Wait; while the cold gray here is round us,
There, rising up behind the height,
The sun in rose-red splendors found us,
And all the world is full of light.

-London Saturday Review.

From Sheet Steel to Bathtub in

A

Six Minutes

By James Cooke Mills

N oblong sheet of steel turned into a bathtub in just six minutes is a record newly established by a remarkable group of machines in a Detroit manufactory-machines that act like huge beings of superior intelligence trained to odd specialties. And the sight of the work in progress is at once astonishing and amusing, for it is a strange thing to see tremendous hydraulic presses perform tasks of such detail and delicacy that they have heretofore been too much even for skilled human hands.

Nothing in the mechanical arts is ever of more genuine interest than the production of new and improved appliances for our homes, to beautify them, or add to our comfort. Because of the intimate

PRESSES WHICH PERFORM FIRST PROCESS OF BATHTUB MAKING.

relation of the household utilities to our every day life, anything that adds to our sum total of enjoyment appeals to us and we are eager to know about it.

A marked advance has recently been made in the manufacture of an article of everyday use; and in order to illustrate the features of the new product of man's ingenuity, step for a moment into your bath room. Here the ugly cast iron tub first meets the eye, and not always pleasantly. The tub is bulky and heavy, enameled on the inside, but on the outside a coat or two of paint is the only finish. Furthermore, the tub contains so much metal that generally the water is cooled much below the desired temperature before one's ablution is finished.

Now, imagine in its place a light, thin tub of graceful lines, porcelained inside and outside, 2nd with your crest and other decorations, which may be varied. to suit the taste, hand painted and burned into the porcelain, and therefore permanent. This ideal of a bathtub combines the desirable quality of lightness with strength and durability, and takes the temperature of the water almost instantly with little absorption of heat. These advantages with the economy of weight in reference to floor construction of hotels and apartment houses and the smooth rolled surfaces of the tubs, permitting of a high permanent decoration, will likely result in the sheet-steel bathtubs supplanting the heavy cumbersome type of present day use.

In the new factory, where this almost magical process has been but recently. adopted, more than one hundred of the steel tubs are turned out every work day. Work is done here by machines not only more powerful, but, if the expression may be allowed, more

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skillful than human hands. The various methods through which the tubs are drawn from flat sheets of steel are very interesting and notable from the fact that steel experts have repeatedly declared that full-sized tubs could not be drawn by any known process without cracking the steel. The problems attending the pressing of a sheet of steel, slightly more than oneeighth of an inch thick, into the irregular shape of a bathtub, with its roll-shaped rim; the elimination of the wrinkles bound to occur in the steel, due to the sloping shaped end and sides; and, finally, the enameling of the tub inside and out, were, to say the least, perplexing. That all difficulties have been removed is due to the mechanical genius of Eugene H. Sloman, the inventor of the process

FIG. 2. PRESS WHICH PERFORMS THE FIRST OPERATION IN MAKING SEAMLESS BATHTUBS FROM STEEL,

and the machine by which the wrinkles are rolled out of the tubs.

The plant, the only one of its kind in the world, gives employment to about one hundred men. The principal equipment consists of three massive hydraulic presses. Two of these are 850-ton draw ing presses, each weighing 125 tons. They are used for drawing the steel from the sheet into the form of the bathtub. The sheets, which are of No. 11 soft steel, 60 inches wide and 78 inches long, are first taken to a small rotary shear and trimmed to a slightly elliptical form. A crude oil lubricant is then applied to the outer edge of the surface and they are ready for the first rough drawing operation, appearing as the one in the foreground in Fig. 1. The first drawing produces the oval cup-shaped form shown in the right of the foreground, and the first form, after being annealed, is then put through a process of inverted redrawing which produces the final ir

regular shape of the finished tub and its roll-shaped rim.

The machine shown in Fig. 2 illustrates the form of dies used in this operation. Projecting upward from the top of die A will be seen the ejector C, which is raised to lift the tub off the die at the completion of the drawing operation. Before the semi-formed tub is placed in the press for the finished drawings which give the sloping end and rollshaped rim, the ejector is lowered so that it becomes flush with the surrounding surface of the die A, and this die is then lowered until it is well down inside of the die box B. The work is then placed in this aperture, bottom down. Die D, which is hollowed to correspond to its die A, and has its lower edges rounded to conform to the roll of the rim of the tub, is then lowered, forcing the bottom of the semi-formed tub to the top of die A. The latter then assumes an ascending movement, forcing the metal upward in

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FIG. 3. HUGE PRESS WHICH PERFORMS A DELICATE TASK WITH MINUTE PERFECTION.

side of die D, thus turning the semiformed tub inside out, and through this inverted redrawing creating the finished form of the tub, the roll-shaped rim being formed by the passing of the metal around the lower curved edges of die D. The tub is then completely drawn and is removed from the press by the ejector, in an inverted position as shown in Fig. 2.

Although the tub has its finished size and shape, by passing one's hand along

the sides and ends corrugations can be felt which are the wrinkles resulting from the drawing operations. These must be eliminated, and it is for this purpose that the machine shown in Fig. 3 was designed. This third press is the most important device used in the entire process-in fact, is the main feature of the works, and is well named "the rocker-roller press." It is a gigantic machine, weighing 175 tons, exerting

simultaneously vertical, lateral, and diagonal pressures of sufficient intensity so to change the flow of the metal as to result in a perfectly smooth surface throughout the entire tub. At the same time the metal is set so that in after heating, which of course is necessary in the enameling process, there is no distortion due to strains in the metal releasing themselves under the heat. This is accomplished by reason of the fact that in the rockerroller press the metal in the irregular shape of the tub is rolled out just as evenly at every point and on the same principle as is a flat sheet when pressed between a pair of rolls.

The rocker - roller press, the only one of its kind ever constructed, is indeed a wonderful machine, and was built by a Philadelphia firm. It stands twenty-eight feet in height from its

foundation, is twenty-one feet long and ten feet wide. The press consists of a frame, having a series of five plungers, each capable of exerting a pressure of 200 tons, and being so arranged that this pressure can be brought to bear in three directions. The vertical plunger carries a rocker, which permits the oscillation of the "roll" or punch suspended at

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FIG. 6. THREE HOLES PUNCHED AT ONCE.. Feed and overflow openings provided for.

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