Fellow Tower Talk members:
Years ago my family owned a company with plants in Fort Worth TX, Tulsa
OK and Ogden UT (Riverside Industries) that made huge steel high voltage
electrical transmission towers that were installed all over the western
and central US.
As part of the process they had huge galvanizing vats some as long as
200 ft. where the steel tower pieces were first dipped and heated in an
acid "pickling" solution to remove rust and any contaminants and then
galvanized. From what I was told they had to heat the pieces in the acid
pickling solution because if they dipped them straight into the
galvanizing solution it would explode in a shower of hot metal solution
all over the place. The inside roof over the vats bore evidence of
someone occasionally forgetting to "pickle" and heat the metal pieces
first. They said the pickling solution both heated the metal and
removed any contaminants (rust) from the tower pieces. I saw many
pieces of steel being dipped into the acid bath that obviously had some
corrosion on them, since much of the raw steel, prior to being stamped
into shape and the holes drilled for bolts, etc, was stacked out in the
open.
I never worked for the company, instead I was a newspaper reporter for
20+ years at several Texas newspapers, but on my vacations and when I
could get a few days off my father and brother would pay me to fly up to
Ogden and Tulsa to take photographs and interview the employees for the
company employee newspaper and the annual report.
We've since sold the entire company (thank goodness). Some of those
winters in Utah and even Tulsa could be brutal. Even though I was often
next to those heated vats, the plant buildings were open air and by the
end of the day my fingers and feet were numb.
73 de Tom, WW5L
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