tarboat's photos with the keyword: wood

The Masonite factory at Drumsna, Co. Leitrim is a major employer in the Carrick-on-Shannon area of Ireland with a staff of around 300. Established in 1997, it produces door facings.

Gibraltar registered ship 'Soniland' has just completed unloading Baltic timber at Albert Dock, Hull. The unloading was undertaken with the Ruston Bucyrus 61-RB tracked SuperCrane belonging to RMS Ports.

In order to make new oak planks fit the curve of a wooden boat the wood needs to be made pliable by placing it in a box of steam and heating to as near to 100 degrees celsius as possible. After a couple of hours the 2 inch thick piece is ready to apply to the boat and you have a very small window before it cools and loses its flexibility. Juggling a heavy piece of wood 30 ft or more long can be interesting and requires plenty of people to handle it. This box was made for this repair job and comprises five plastic drums with the bottoms cut out and two steel drums at the ends. Water is poured into the bottom drum through a hole which is seen here with a wooden bung in. The plank sticks through a slot in the top drum and can be seen disappearing around the side of the boat. The bending is only required at one end of the plank so it doesn't all have to be steamed. The steam box/tube is raised at one end so that the condensing steam runs back to the bottom. The main tube is wrapped in loft insulation and plastic sheet. Water is heated by propane torches in a small brick hearth. Simple but effective.

A corner of the timber yard operated by R.G. Holz Ltd at Viseu de Sus, Romania. Timber is brought down to the yard for processing via a long narrow gauge railway which stretches up into the mountains close to the border with Ukraine.

New planks are in the place where once was holes and rot. Might just float off at the weekend.

This end of the Bosley Mills site is no longer in use by Wood Treatment International for their processing of a range of organic materials such as SoftWood Fibres, Olive Stones, Almond, Walnut and Coconut Shells for use in a wide variety of industries including explosives, thermoplastics, glucose production and effluent handling. The silos are empty and disused whilst the sheds are in other industrial uses.

I knew nothing about chopwood kilns until I attended a walk around the Kilnsey area of Wharfdale lead by Janis Heward who has made a detailed study of this industrial process. Chopwood kilns produced the dried wood (whitecoal) used as fuel in the ore hearth lead smelting process. The coppiced wood was placed on a grid of large green timbers in the low dry stone-walled structure with a narrow entrance built into a bank. In the pit below a controlled fire was burned to dry the timber above. There are many of these structures to be found in various ruinous states in the northern lead smelting areas. This example is one of the better preserved examples on a hillside between Threshfield and Kilnsey. Janis has produced an interesting web page all about these kilns .

The sun was shining and I was passing through Bosley so it would have been a pity to miss out on a few shots of this place. On the site of a former brassworks at Bosley near Macclesfield is the works of Wood Treatment International Ltd. The company processes a range of organic materials such as SoftWood Fibres, Olive Stones, Almond, Walnut and Coconut Shells for use in a wide variety of industries including explosives, thermoplastics, glucose production and effluent handling. A major product is natural pet litter. With all the different powders around the factory is rated is a major explosion risk by the authorities.

A calm day on the Shannon. The Masonite factory at Drumsna, Co. Leitrim is a major employer in the Carrick-on-Shannon area of Ireland with a staff of around 300. Established in 1997, it produces door facings.

A windy day on the Shannon. Central to the production process at the Masonite plant at Drumsna is a 44.5 Megawatt wood-fuelled furnace which utilises 5 large electrical air fans to sustain the combustion processes and to cool the exhaust gases.