Sand in Their Shoes:: The Story of American Steel Foundries

By Franklin M. Reck

Fascinating history of American Steel Foundries, manufacturer of railroad couplers, trucks, and draft gear that cushion the shocks as well as cast armor for tanks, hydraulic presses, and numerous other specialized steel items. With corporate timeline. Illustrated throughout with pen and ink sketches.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Braunfell Books
• Release date: Feb 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805230472

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE—Green Sand

The company known as American Steel Foundries is the largest maker of steel castings in the United States. It is many other things besides, but that can wait. The company’s steel castings are found mostly on railroads, holding the train together, taking the weight of the cars, easing the shocks of the rails. But they are also found in oil fields, ships, big machines, highway trucks, and army tanks. They’re found in any spot where you need more strength than iron and a shape no other process can achieve.

The company likes to improve things. Its engineers, metallurgists and test experts are hard to please. They’re apostles of discontent. Working with their customers, sometimes with other foundries, often alone, these men have been poking into the nature of things for a couple of generations, with the result that they’ve done much to advance the art from its uncertain beginnings to its present state of excellence. Because of ASF we ride more safely on trains today, and so does a crate of eggs. We’re better off in many other ways that the public seldom knows about because ASFs contributions are modestly hid underneath something else, where folks don’t see them.

American Steel Foundries began in many places. It began in eight different foundries scattered from the Mississippi to the Atlantic. Some of these foundries stretch their roots deep into the past, to the beginnings of the art in this country. We’ll begin this history with the story of one plant and its discovery: Ten years before American Steel Foundries came into existence the cast-steel expert of Schickle, Harrison and Howard Iron Company in St, Louis was struggling with a problem. He was a big man, with a voice like a bull. He was absolutely fearless and impatient of those who were less fearless. There were those who called James G. McRoberts, that wild Scotch-Irishman.

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McRoberts had reason to be wild that November day in 1892. On the 19th, the superintendent Tom Gallagher had handed him the patterns for a cast steel wheel and told him to cast twenty-four of them. The patterns made McRoberts shake his head in doubt. They were a peculiar design and he suspected that the wheels would pull apart as the metal cooled in the baked molds then in use.

He was right. They had checked and cracked and pulled apart, and now, after ten days of struggle, only part of the order was filled and scrap wheels were piling up in the corner. The customer, a George J. Fritz, was in the front office pounding the table. If the foundry couldn’t finish the order within twenty-four hours, by Satan, he’d take his patterns and go elsewhere.

With a growing sense of futility, McRoberts had five more of the dry sand molds made up, this time using new sand mixtures and employing other devices to make the metal cool properly. With a silent prayer he had the ladleman pour the steel.

If these are okay, he was thinking, maybe Fritz will cool off.

He shook them out, took a long look, and slumped. Only one of the five was good. The rest were fractured and pulled apart. At this rate, they were about to lose a customer.

Driven to a corner, a man will think of many things. Big Mac now remembered something that had happened a year ago in East St. Louis, at the St. Louis Steel Foundry Company. There, instead of dumping surplus steel onto the foundry floor, as some shops did, McRoberts had the extra metal poured into small ingot molds. This kept the sand and dirt out of the steel and left it in good shape for reuse.

One day, a molder came to McRoberts just as a heat was being poured, to tell him they’d forgotten to bake an ingot mold for the surplus. There was no time to make a mold or dry it.

Rather than pour the metal on the floor, McRoberts had the molders ram up a mold out of green (unbaked) sand. He waved a hand to Charlie Hutchinson, the ladleman.

Pour the steel in that, he ordered.

Charlie was shocked. It was well-known that you couldn’t pour steel into a green sand mold. It would blow and sputter. It might even form enough steam to explode.

Men gathered. Voices grew loud. The ladle waited, poised over the mold. The red crept up McRoberts’ neck and presently the Irish part of his makeup took command. With a snort of disgust he grabbed the handle of the ladle while Charlie and his fellows ran for cover. The yellow stream flowed into the gates of the mold.

Nothing happened. A little bubbling at first, then the metal lay quiet. McRoberts looked satisfied while the others scratched their heads. As far as McRoberts knew, that little incident, a year ago in 1891, marked the first use of a green sand mold in the history of foundry work.

Mac was thinking of that now, while puzzling the problem of the wheels. He was wondering if a green sand mold might not be the answer. There was a chance that it might accommodate itself better to the peculiar shape of the wheel than a baked mold. Of course he’d never used green sand for anything more complicated than an ingot, and in fact his general manager, Edward F. Goltra, had forbidden its use for customer products.

But Mac wanted to make good on the wheel order and was in a mood to take a chance. He had two green sand molds made up and taken to the casting floor and told Bill Wiedman and Bob Allison how he wanted them poured.

The two men looked at the molds, turned away, and shook their heads. Charlie Hutchinson told us not to, one of them explained. They’ll blow up.

So once again McRoberts grabbed the pouring handle while the rest took shelter a safe distance away, and once again the molten steel ran into the gates of a green sand mold.

Forty feet away, two men stood laughing, waiting expectantly for fireworks. As the molds slowly filled their grins faded.

But the real test was to come when the wheels were shaken out. Most foundrymen believed that shapes poured in green sand would be full of blowholes and therefore no good. When these two wheels were inspected, however, they were found to be satisfactory in every respect.

The next day four more wheels were poured and these, too, were good. The order was filled, the customer was reasonably happy, and a fond foundry tradition had been blown to bits.

McRoberts’ success with the car wheels made a convert of Edward F. Goltra. This Princeton graduate was quick to realize that here was a revolution in foundry practice. Up to now, nobody had ever considered using anything but dry sand molds. This dry sand was actually a combination of silica sand and fire clay to which rosin, dextrine or flour had been added to bind the mass firmly together in the desired shape. The mold was dried in an oven for hours, or even days, depending on the amount of sand to be dried. This baking process tied up a great deal of equipment.

But the worst feature arose from the fact that steel shrinks nearly one-quarter inch in every foot, while cooling. This caused difficulties. If the product happened to be a complicated shape containing elongated thin sections joining two heavier sections, the contracting metal encountered too much resistance from the hard-baked sand. Since the sand wouldn’t give, there was nothing for the metal to do but tear apart as it shrank. This was what limited the variety of products you could cast. It was what made McRoberts shake his head in doubt when he had looked at the wheel patterns.

Green sand seemed to correct the difficulty. For a green sand mold, made of a mixture of sand, clay and binders, while firm enough to hold its shape, was far from brick-hard. As the metal cooled, the sand yielded sufficiently to the shrinking steel to allow the product to hold together. To Goltra and McRoberts, this fact lifted the horizon for cast steel. It opened the curtain on a dazzling new field of opportunity, and their enthusiasm can be imagined. They lost no time taking advantage of it.

Goltra went to his friend Rolla Wells, the St. Louis traction magnate, told him of the possibilities, and suggested that Wells finance a new cast-steel foundry.

But Wells had to be shown, and he said in effect: If you can convince me in a practical demonstration that a sound basic steel casting can be made in a green sand mold, I’ll consider your proposition.

Goltra decided that the demonstration might as well be dramatic. The year was 1893, and on the shores of Lake Michigan Chicago was enjoying the Columbian Exposition with its brilliant display of electric lights, the first giant Ferris Wheel the world had seen, fine displays of new machinery for industry, a roaring Midway, and the wiggling dancer known as Little Egypt. There was also on display at Chicago a locomotive frame of cast steel exhibited by Krupp. American foundries had yet to cast satisfactory locomotive frames.

The spirit of the day was one of challenge and nowhere was the spirit more evident than in Chicago. Goltra sent McRoberts to Chicago with the necessary patterns, cores and flask to ram up a mold for a railway truck bolster, and arranged for space in a South Chicago foundry, not far from the World’s Fair. Then he suggested to Rolla Wells that they visit the Fair and at the same time look at a green sand demonstration.

Wells recalls the event in his biography. As Wells and Goltra left the Auditorium Hotel on Michigan Avenue to take the Illinois Central to South Chicago they were joined by an inquisitive and highly skeptical Pennsylvania foundryman.

It’s a fool’s errand, this man said privately to Wells. It can’t be done, you know.

I know, Wells agreed. But I’ve gone this far. I might as well see it through.

On the casting floor of the foundry, McRoberts and a molder rammed up a mold. They did it in the presence of the three visitors, so that they could be sure it was made of green sand. The ladle was swung over the mold and the nozzle placed in position for pouring.

I’m getting out of here, said the Pennsylvanian and retreated to the protection of an iron pillar about a hundred feet away. Wells hesitated, decided that caution was the better part of valor, and followed. Everyone but Goltra and McRoberts stampeded.

Once again the hot steel ran into the mold and there were no fireworks. The Pennsylvanian suspected a trick. He said the casting was bound to be no good.

The next day, all hands returned to the foundry, measured the bolster, broke it in two, and found it sound of texture and satisfactory in shape.

With this demonstration, all doubts disappeared. The party returned to St. Louis and in due time James G. McRoberts was granted patent number 504,361, filed on July 8, 1893, and issued September 5, 1893, covering certain green sand processes for casting steel.

The new plant was located in Granite City, Illinois, on level bottom land across the river from St. Louis. Its name was the American Steel Foundry Company. It was incorporated April 5, 1894, under the laws of Illinois, and ground was broken on a 24½ acre site on June 15.

The first buildings erected were a main foundry building 300 by 80 feet and two 40-foot lean-tos. The foundry was equipped with two overhead cranes, both bought from the Chicago World’s Fair. The company’s earliest products were railroad bolsters and couplers, both made of basic steel poured into green sand molds.

Men recall those early days at Granite City with a sense of wonderment. They can hardly believe that conditions were so primitive. There were so few rooming facilities in the town that half the force lived in a hotel on the plant grounds, sleeping in shifts, and thinking nothing of