BRIQUETTERING COMPANY
(Continuation).
76
The factory proper is 30 feet wide by 52 feet long, engine room 34 feet by 10 feet, and boiler-house 34 feet by 12 feet. The engines and machinery have all arrived per Glengyle and other boats, and are now being taken to the site from the godowns, and stored temporarily in matsheds, though everything will be in position in a few weeks. The engine is of horizontal pattern 16 inch cylinder 30-inch stroke, improved "trunk" type, with a fly wheel of 9ft. 4in. diameter and 1 ft. 2 in. face weighing four tons. The boiler is an "improved Lancashire" 27 ft. by 6 ft. 6in. working pressure 80 pounds to the square inch, and is fitted with a high speed governor of latest type. This engine will drive two briquette machines Robert Middleton's patent. The whole has been supplied by Messrs. Middleton and Co. of Leeds, who are represented by Mr. Plant.
"The process was clearly described by the Superintendent as follows:-
The coal dust, sprinkled with a dry kind of pitch to give consistency, is brought alongside a feeder and poured into an "endless chain" of buckets, fitted with Middleton's patent coupling links. This elevator carries the material up to the top of an automatic machine, into which the stream of coal runs, without ceasing, first into a crusher, thence to a riddle of very fine mesh, after which it is again carried aloft into a vertical heater, where the mixture of coal and pitch is subjected to a temperature of 600 degrees, in order to make it thoroughly cohesive. From this chamber it passes into a cooling pan and thence to a moulding table, where the material is moulded into blocks under a pressure of two tons to the square inch. Part of the machine simultaneously fills the moulds, compresses and pushes them out to the endless delivery carrier, all automatically.
"The two briquette machines now being put up at Kowloon are guaranteed to turn out 100 tons in ten hours, though probably they will each make actually about 60 tons in that time. Their ordinary working speed is 18 briquettes a minute, each of these being about ten pounds in weight, 9 in. by 6 in. by 5 in.
"Besides the factory itself there is to be a large storing shed for pitch and other things, 96 feet long 71 feet wide, and 24 feet high. The foundations of this building are now well advanced, and large gangs of coolies are hard at work under the energetic superintendent. Between shed and the factory a large space is reserved for stacking the briquettes or brickbats or bric-a-brac, as they are facetiously termed. Later, when the manufacture of the patent fuel is a demonstrated success, there will be extensive godowns along the sea front, towards Yaumati and an aerial railway running