Hi All,

Whenever Cornish tin mines are mentioned on the box or wherever, you
always see a pickure that looks like a roodless house with a tall
chimney.

Are there/were there lots of these scatterered around Cornwall, or is
it just the same one they always show?

Also,

How big is it/they. I always assummed they are house sized, but it
occurs to me they could equally be cathedral sized..

Also, what was there use when the mine was in production?

TIA

Chris

On Jan 14, 9:46*am, Chris Holmes wrote:
Hi All,

Whenever Cornish tin mines are mentioned on the box or wherever, you
always see a pickure that looks like a roodless house with a tall
chimney.

Are there/were there lots of these scatterered around Cornwall, or is
it just the same one they always show?

Also,

How big is it/they. *I always assummed they are house sized, but it
occurs to me they could equally be cathedral sized..

Also, what was there use when the mine was in production?

TIA

Chris

They originally housed the steam boilers and pump to keep the mine
clear of water.
One I visited was about 10m X 5m internally, walls around 1m thick and
about 8m high. Chimney was a about 20m high.
But they vary

Chris Holmes wrote:
Hi All,

Whenever Cornish tin mines are mentioned on the box or wherever, you
always see a pickure that looks like a roodless house with a tall
chimney.

Are there/were there lots of these scatterered around Cornwall, or is
it just the same one they always show?

There are lots of them about. They were too expensive to demolish after
the mines closed.

Also,

How big is it/they. I always assummed they are house sized, but it
occurs to me they could equally be cathedral sized..

It depends on how big the mine was. Mostly in the fifty to sixty foot
square size range.

Also, what was there use when the mine was in production?

http://www.geevor.com/index.php?page=42

Has pictures of what surrounds the boiler house in a working mine. In
the old mines, these buildings were made from timber as cheaply as
possible, and were just left to fall down or burn when the mine was
closed, after all the valuable stuff had been removed.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.

On 14/01/2013 09:46, Chris Holmes wrote:
Hi All,

Whenever Cornish tin mines are mentioned on the box or wherever, you
always see a pickure that looks like a roodless house with a tall
chimney.

Are there/were there lots of these scatterered around Cornwall, or is
it just the same one they always show?

Also,

How big is it/they. I always assummed they are house sized, but it
occurs to me they could equally be cathedral sized..

They are fairly chunky things that housed a boiler and a steam engine
used to pump water out of the mines. There are quite a lot of derelict
ones around the coast. They tend to always photograph the most scenics
and picturesque ones for obvious reasons.

Also, what was there use when the mine was in production?

Stopping the mine from flooding. A bit of history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolcoath_mine

And with metal prices now rising rapidly they are economic deposits and
could see action again although with much higher tech mining gear:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Crofty

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

On 14/01/2013 12:34, Chris Hogg wrote:

A number of actual engines have also been preserved, both in Cornwall
and elsewhere, notably around Camborne and at St. Just (the National
Trust owns or has responsibility for them), and the pumping engines at
Kew Bridge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kew_Bridge_Steam_Museum


I was just thinking of Kew Bridge Steam Museum, and you got there first.
It's definitely worth a visit, as you can climb up inside the
house-sized steam engine whilst it's operating.

On Monday, 14 January 2013 09:46:44 UTC, Chris Holmes wrote:
Whenever Cornish tin mines are mentioned on the box or wherever, you
always see a pickure that looks like a roodless house with a tall
chimney.

Plenty of them left. They were stone-built, so hard to demolish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House-built_engine

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Beam_engines
has plenty of photos and drawings with scale.
Here's a survivor, with a Mini alongside.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cornish_engine,_Goonvean_-_geograph..org.uk_-_629788.jpg

They're 4 stories high, although one of these was usually a semi-basement. Size was fairly consistent, although the waterworks engines were bigger and then there's Cruquius (one engine, multiple beams)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Filee_Cruquius_-_foto_Vereniging_Hendrick_de_Keyser_%284%29.jpg

These engines were usually "Cornish engines" (which is a type, not a location) and they went up and down as beam engines, rather than round and round (many beam engines also drove a rotary crankshaft, but not these). They were primarily to drive a very long vertical wooden rod, with pumps at the bottom of it for draining a mine shaft.

Another development was the "man engine"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_engine
This (at its crudest) hung a pair of ladders in the pump rod shaft. By stepping from one to the other, as the engine went up and down, a miner could be lifted up the shaft without having to climb themselves. And yes, these did appear in the ancient computer game "Manic Miner"

On 14/01/2013 09:46, Chris Holmes wrote:
Hi All,

Whenever Cornish tin mines are mentioned on the box or wherever, you
always see a pickure that looks like a roodless house with a tall
chimney.

Are there/were there lots of these scatterered around Cornwall, or is
it just the same one they always show?

Also,

How big is it/they. I always assummed they are house sized, but it
occurs to me they could equally be cathedral sized..

Also, what was there use when the mine was in production?

TIA

Chris

There was a Grand Designs on one - maybe have a look for that if you are
interested? They ended up with an impressive "balcony" that looked like
it was not supported properly.

--
Rod

On Monday, 14 January 2013 10:01:47 UTC, harry wrote:
They originally housed the steam boilers and pump to keep the mine
clear of water.

The boilers were usually outside the engine house, in a much lower side building that has usually disappeared by now.

Because the engines were "house built", the engine house itself supported the beam pivot and so had to be very substantially built (almost always stone). This made the engine house long-lasting, even when derelict.

The boiler house, in contrast, was little more than a shed. Many boilers were outdoors, covered by nothing more than a layer of bricks as some rudimentary insulation. Few boilerhouses thus survive.

On 14/01/13 09:46, Chris Holmes wrote:

Also, what was there use when the mine was in production?

Clotted cream extraction. The building was for storing barrels of the stuff.

The chimney is where they heated up their pasties at lunchtime.

On Monday, January 14, 2013 12:34:43 PM UTC, Chris Hogg wrote:

South America, and the USA. They are typically three stories high,
with a sort of internal basement that housed the valve gear.

The valve gear is mostly on the ground floor, where the engine driver spent most of their time. The basement was rarely visited and largely filled with an open swamp of warm water and condensate. The main components down there were the cataract (the engine's governor) and air or condensate pumps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataract_%28beam_engine%29

The majority of the pumping engines
were single-acting (i.e. steam admitted to one side of the piston
only), although winding and crushing engines were double-acting.

There were more differences than this. The Cornish cycle was surprisingly efficient, which is one reason why these arcane and ancient single-acting engines were still built new into the 20th century, even though their non-rotating nature was a limit for some tasks.


A battery of (I think) seven of them at Sudbrook were used to pump
'the Great Spring' out of the rail tunnel under the Severn estuary,
linking Monmouth to Gloucestershire. IIRC these were replaced by
electric pumps and scrapped in the 1960's, because nobody could raise
the relatively modest sum (a few thousand £s, IIRC) to preserve them.

The construction of the tunnel used a great variety of engines, in a number of different engine houses. For the operation of the tunnel though, the Great Spring (which is actually in Wales, inshore of the pump house and not under the Channel, was pumped by a new pump house of six Cornish engines working down the same shaft. These were removed in the 1960s, because the shaft was still required as the only location for pumping. It's in use to this day.

One beam is preserved in Swansea (although it seems quite unloved and has bounced around between museums since). The engines couldn't be preserved because there was nowhere to put them. They are some of the most house-built engines I've ever seen, short of Cruquius, and it would have been astronomically expensive to build any sort of house that could display them. Nor were they terribly exciting engines, in comparison to many others being scrapped around this time. Only as part of the overall tunnel and shaft were they really that impressive.


Best books I know of for the Cornish engine in particular are these:

Woodall, Frank D. (1975). Steam Engines and Waterwheels.

Kelly, Maurice (2002). The Non-Rotative Beam Engine. Camden Miniature Steam Services.

And I recall one building I went to as a lad down there having a substantial
drop inside the 'door', presumably they needed more height than they
actually built!

Brian

--
Brian Gaff....Note, this account does not accept Bcc: email.
graphics are great, but the blind can't hear them
Email:
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________


"Andy Dingley" wrote in message
...
On Monday, 14 January 2013 10:01:47 UTC, harry wrote:
They originally housed the steam boilers and pump to keep the mine
clear of water.

The boilers were usually outside the engine house, in a much lower side
building that has usually disappeared by now.

Because the engines were "house built", the engine house itself supported
the beam pivot and so had to be very substantially built (almost always
stone). This made the engine house long-lasting, even when derelict.

The boiler house, in contrast, was little more than a shed. Many boilers
were outdoors, covered by nothing more than a layer of bricks as some
rudimentary insulation. Few boilerhouses thus survive.

Chris Holmes formulated on Monday :
Hi All,

Whenever Cornish tin mines are mentioned on the box or wherever, you
always see a pickure that looks like a roodless house with a tall
chimney.

Are there/were there lots of these scatterered around Cornwall, or is
it just the same one they always show?

Also,

How big is it/they. I always assummed they are house sized, but it
occurs to me they could equally be cathedral sized..

Also, what was there use when the mine was in production?

TIA

Chris

There are lots of them, all of a similar style.

--
Regards,
Harry (M1BYT) (L)
http://www.ukradioamateur.co.uk

On Mon, 14 Jan 2013 09:02:22 -0800 (PST), Andy Dingley
wrote:

On Monday, January 14, 2013 12:34:43 PM UTC, Chris Hogg wrote:

South America, and the USA. They are typically three stories high,
with a sort of internal basement that housed the valve gear.

The valve gear is mostly on the ground floor, where the engine driver spent most of their time. The basement was rarely visited and largely filled with an open swamp of warm water and condensate. The main components down there were the cataract (the engine's governor) and air or condensate pumps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataract_%28beam_engine%29

The majority of the pumping engines
were single-acting (i.e. steam admitted to one side of the piston
only), although winding and crushing engines were double-acting.

There were more differences than this. The Cornish cycle was surprisingly efficient, which is one reason why these arcane and ancient single-acting engines were still built new into the 20th century, even though their non-rotating nature was a limit for some tasks.


Supposedly where the expression going nineteen to a dozen originated,
19000 gallons of water pumped from a mine using 12 bushels of coal was
used to describe an engine working well.

G.Harman

On 14/01/2013 20:23, wrote:
Supposedly where the expression going nineteen to a dozen originated,
19000 gallons of water pumped from a mine using 12 bushels of coal was
used to describe an engine working well.

Surely this would be entirely dependent on how high the water needed to
be pumped.

Andy

On Mon, 14 Jan 2013 22:56:06 +0000, Andy Champ
wrote:

On 14/01/2013 20:23, wrote:
Supposedly where the expression going nineteen to a dozen originated,
19000 gallons of water pumped from a mine using 12 bushels of coal was
used to describe an engine working well.

Surely this would be entirely dependent on how high the water needed to
be pumped.

Andy
Probably but I don't know any Cornish miners from the reign of King
William the IV or Queen Victoria to ask which why I wrote supposedly.
The expression is probably genuine enough but it's technical accuracy
may not be.
Not that it is alone in that,you hear people with a mike stuck near
their nostrils by a reporter because they witnessed their neighbours
results of some poor diy on the gas cooker say "it sounded like a bomb
going off". There is quite a variety between Mills and Hydrogen.

G.Harman

On Tuesday, January 15, 2013 2:27:54 AM UTC, wrote:

Probably but I don't know any Cornish miners from the reign of King
William the IV or Queen Victoria to ask

Lean's Engine Reporter is a whole book of this, with hard numbers. Printed editions in the last few decades too. "Engine duty" is the usual term for Cornwall.

On Mon, 14 Jan 2013 12:34:43 +0000, Chris Hogg wrote:

and the pumping engines at
Kew Bridge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kew_Bridge_Steam_Museum

Last time I was there, I was seriously thinking of volunteering to do
some maintenance - they were looking for volunteers, probably still
are, as it's an ongoing thing. I left the country shortly afterwards,
anyway.