and C. Schmidt at Niederlahnstein, in rolls 100 metres (328 ft.) long.
3. Plate Glass Production
This consisted of one Plate tank with all Corhart sides at the melting end and Didier material at the working end. The tank house was very badly damaged and it was stated that it would take 6 to 8 months to get going again.
The tank had a drop arch about 12 ft. wide strutted with steel beams. The sides were Corhart up to about 15 ft. from the rolling machine where they were aluminous clay covered with sawdust insulation bricks. The crown was of silica brick about 14" thick, not insulated. These crown bricks were very big, being about 8" x 5" x 14". There were three stacks on each side and the port midfeathers finished in the vertical position so that combustion must start in the port and not in the tank. Two sets of floaters were used and two filling pockets with silica arches on the front of the tank.
Production was stated to be 750,000 sq. ft. per month.
In the lehr the first section of rollers, 40 in all, have cooling water tubes passing right through the centres and delivering the water into a trough running alongside the lehr. They also had hand pump lubrication of roller bearings.
It was proposed to restart the tank before the pot furnaces.
4. Pot Rooms
These were appreciably damaged and there were no pots in stock fit to use, most having suffered through exposure to weather. Clay stocks were considered to be good enough to start pot making and 1 pot had already been made but there were no prospects yet of renewed supplies of French and Belgium clays. Shortage of power was considered to be the biggest bar to getting under way. Grossalmerode clay was used for making pots for the Sindorf factory but not for the Plate pots used here.
Cast pots were made here before the war but the process was discontinued in 1939 and the plant had been appreciably damaged, a bomb having fallen nearby. During the war only hand made pots were produced, the :lays used being of French and Belgian origin. A typical pot mixture was described as 33% raw clay mixture, 25% sherds, 25% grog and 17% ground silica but the proportion of the latter was varied according to the alumina content of the raw clay. A number of mixtures had been made up using broken green pots.
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