10 historical Shot Towers from around the world

[Kestrel4k]

An article posted on a non-firearms website so you'd perhaps need to forgive some of the writing, but the series of pics are fantastic:

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/10-dark-towers-that-once-made-the-worlds-bullets?utm_source=zergnet.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=zergnet_1123699

Best regards,

[MarkP]

Thanks Nice pictures

[runfiverun]

it was written more as a place to see when your here thing.
but the pictures in the extra links were pretty neat.

[Walter Laich]

so anyone know how the got the melted lead to the top or did they melt it there?

[M-Tecs]

The one video I watched the lead was melt at the top.

[victorfox]

I suppose you are not alllowed to dig around for some "histoical" galena ??? :roll:

[bikerbeans]

Great pics! Unfornately, The Wife will not let me build one in the backyard.

BB

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Great pics! Unfornately, The Wife will not let me build one in the backyard.

BB

People can be so unreasonable.

They are impressive pictures indeed. Shot is very expensive in the UK nowadays, and I suspect that a lot of it is produced by short-drop processes, allowing the molten globule to hit water within a quarter inch or so, so that the tail collapses into the body as the front solidifies. Still, there seems to be an opening for utilising some of the disused factory chimneys which still exist, and which if made of brickwork, it seems a great shame to demolish. I don't even see why you would need the chimney, if you use a fairly wide vat of water, and can be content to drop shot on days of still air.

I think the main obstacle to reopening a shot tower must be the safety of the men at the top. But with electricity or gas it would surely be possible to hoist the apparatus up on rails running up the inside, and melt and drop without anyone going up there at all.

In the UK decades ago someone did a TV documentary about Fred Dibnah, a Lancashire steeplejack who specialised in the demolition of factory chimneys by a method he claimed could drop them with far greater precision than explosives. He would chisel out bricks, wedging stout wooden props into the hole, until he had removed enough to build a bonfire and set the props alight. But Fred turned out to be a talker, on his passions of Victorian engineering and the restoration of steam road engines. He ended up an icon, making his several series of his own.

Actually he disliked chimney demolition, so much associated with him, because they and the British standard brick, which can stand so much weight, are noble things. You can even measure g force on a turning or accelerating vehicle, by the force required to make it fall over when it is standing on any of its three different kinds of face.

[Pumpkinheaver]

Great pictures and a little history to boot, thanks for sharing.