front line trenches„ though of course not as sanguinary a
Transcript of front line trenches„ though of course not as sanguinary a
H
UNDREDS OF additional air-
planes are being constructed
monthly from the millions of pounds
of salvaged scrap swept up from the
floors, collected in trash cans and
otherwise "recovered" from the
aircraft manufacturing plants of the
United States. Long before civilians
ever heard of a "salvage drive,"'
aircraft manufacturers recognized the
importance of their scrap material and
took steps to collect and resmelt it.
Today it is literally true that hundreds
of combat planes are being made out
of scrap that was once thrown away.
At one plant alone, it was discovered,
for example, that enough aluminum
scrap was unavoidably created during
the construction of. two of its giant
bombers to furnish an aluminum skin
for a third one. At another plant
enough scrap aluminum to build 64
dive-bombers was salvaged within a
period of thirty days.
It has been written of the Chicago
stockyards that they are so efficient
that the only thing the operators
haven't been able to salvage and use is
a pig's squeal. It might perhaps more
truly be said of today's average
airplane production plant that the only
thing which hasn't been saved is the
whine of the machines and the racket
of rivet guns, as new planes roll off the
production lines to join those which
have previously taken to the air.
Statistics reveal that battling the
Axis with scrap is a battle fully as
realistic as any being waged in the
front line trenches„ though of course not as sanguinary a
one. If you have the idea that the salvaging of miscellaneous
and formerly wasted material is just a joke, a lot of "hooey"
engaged in because somebody started a "drive", and that
soon it will be dropped or forgotten, you' re wrong. Ponder
for a moment such facts as these: Within a period of only 30
days enough scrap aluminum was gathered at the Long
Island City plant of Brewster Aeronautical Corporation to
build sixty-four Brewster dive-bombers, and enough scrap
steel to construct seven 27-ton tanks or twenty-one 8-inch
antiaircraft guns. The thirty-day recovery included 145 tons
of aluminum scrap, 105 tons of steel, 3 tons of stainless
steel, 1,000 pounds of copper and 700 pounds of rubber.
Over at Douglas Aircraft Company's plant in Santa
Monica, California, they' ll tell you that literally hundreds of
combat planes are being "swept up off the floors." Last year,
for example, enough dural was reclaimed from scrapheaps
to furnish the entire aluminum content for a huge fleet of
Douglas attack-bombers. Speaking of aluminum,
Westinghouse Electric thought it did a pretty fair job when
it reclaimed 120,000 pounds per month for an annual total
of around one-and-one-half million pounds. Yet that total,
big as it was, amounts to only one-half of that salvaged by
Douglas Aircraft. Westinghouse also reported an additional
salvage of 1,180,000 pounds of other non-ferrous metals per
month ― so much in fact that at the year's end it took 3,000
freight cars to haul it away. Had all those cars been hooked
up to one engine and a caboose, it would make a train 25
miles long. And anybody will admit that is a lot of scrap.
Even the largest manufacturers now look upon "waste"
materials as money on deposit. Take
Buick, for instance. During 1941 it is said
to have piled up a scrapheap of
244,000,000 pounds. In fact Buick is so
stingy of its leavings that it even
recaptures exhaust steam, uses and reuses
it, and then. converts it back into water.,
before calling the job done.
At Boeing Aircraft Company the stuff
that is swept up from the floors is
adjudged worth more than a million
dollars a year. One government bureau has
figured out that just the sheet scrap from
the nation's aircraft p1ants alone, if
properly segregated, would save enough
aluminum to build 250 B-17s a month and
in addition save enough magnesium to
make 50,000 incendiary bombs monthly.
Though that may seem like a lot, you
must recall that every operation in the
primary shops, where the metal is cut
up, produces trimmings, ends and
metal "sawdust." For example, into
Boeing trash bins go, in the order of
their importance, aluminum, stainless
steel and plain steel scrap. Steel and
dural borings, or metal sawdust, is
swept up around the routers and
milling machines, taken to the salvage
yard and sifted through a screen. Dural
tubing, valuable for its magnesium
alloy, is another important gift to the
melting pot. Strips of sheet metal from
the punch presses and brass borings
from the lathes are also important
items. Still others include clamps,
rubber and metal caps for tubing,
bolts, nuts, screws, rivets, metal and
iron washers, short pieces of insulated
copper, burlap, wiring, etc. Personal
tools appear occasionally and one
week two small electric motors are
reported to have been discovered amid
the "trash." Even old rags, once
headed for the incinerator, now go to
the laundry, where they are washed,
baled and returned to the factory.
Every month Boeing sends two tons of
used tabulator cards, made from high
grade manila stock, to an out-of-town
pulp mill. Small stuff such as bolts,
nuts, screws, etc., are reclaimed and
returned to the shops from whence
they came, though huge quantities of.
the scrap are sold. Aluminum, of
course, is remelted and rerolled,
though its final destination is
determined by the War Priorities
Board.
OUT AT ONE of the new Wright Aero-
nautical plants, "somewhere in Ohio,"
they have developed a fast chip
handling system that collects tons of
steel, aluminum, magnesium, brass
and bronze chips every 24 hours. In
less than 40 minutes a miniature
haystack of long, curly shavings can
be removed from a machine to a
special metal container, dumped into a
conveyor train, crushed, freed of
machine oil and compactly stowed
away in a railroad gondola car. When
as many as 10 to 15 gondola cars are
loaded, a gasoline tractor hauls them
swiftly away to a chip processing
plant. Here the gondola: are dumped,
the metal cargo being tossed into drain
pans where a portion of the machine
oil still clinging to the chips is drained
off. Then the bunches of chips or
shavings are pulled apart so they can
more easily be stuffed into a hammer
mill crusher which presses them even
more compactly. Chips which have
been cut from oil coolants come from
the crusher to be dumped into a
standard industrial centrifuge. Whirled
at 780 revolutions per minute these
chips lose their last trace of oil which
spins oft to be drained and reclaimed.
Oil-free chips drop onto a belt
conveyor which hoists them into a 100-
ton storage hopper 40 feet above a
spur track on which railroad gondola
cars are waiting. A chute opens and
down hurtle 25 tons of metal into a
gondola, ready for shipment to a
processing plant for utilization again in
the war effort.
Enough rubber to completely equip
four B-17 Flying Fortresses was
located within a single week in the
New Jersey plants of Curtiss-Wright
Corporation's propeller division. From
long lines of machine tools used in
making propellers come ton upon ton
of. scrap steel shavings, turnings and
overage. Welders now toss butt ends of
expensive and now rare tungsten into
special receptacles. Copper from
electric wiring, brass from discarded
electric light bulbs, tin containers from
cafeterias and worn files, of valuable
carbon steel, are all being salvaged.
Cutting and lubricating oils and
solvents are being reclaimed by means
of filtration and distillation. Packing
cases are dismantled and the lumber
used for shipping Wright equipment.
Worn and useless burlap bags are
returned to the manufacturer so the
jute may be reclaimed and later
rewoven. Waste paper from offices and
shops is shredded and baled for use in
repacking.
Twice the tonnage of the famed
B-24 Liberator is rescued today from
the rubbish pile at Consolidated Air-
craft, according to executive vice
president I M Ladden. "Prior to Pearl
Harbor most of our scrap materials
were dumped or burned as not worth
the trouble of saving," comments Mr.
Ladden, "but today a salvage
personnel of 17 people sifts floor
sweepings and combs refuse waste
baskets. And what comes out? Well in
a single month, 35 tons of aluminum
shavings were saved, together with 11
tons of paper, 266 tons of scrap iron,
20 tons of neoprene and rubber, 45
tons of steel shavings, half a ton of
Plexiglas, 4,350 gallons of waste oil, 6
tons of stainless steel, 3,342 pieces of
3-ply panels, 515 barrels and drums, a
ton of wool fabric, 6 tons of shoddy
and burlap, 700 bearings, 670 pounds
of manila rope, 10 tons of lead dross,
848 electric drills, 2 tons of bronze
shavings, 1 ton of copper, 26,695
gallons of paint thinner and tons of
miscellaneous rags.
"Eight thousand, five hundred
gallons of waste crankcase oil, from
engines being tested, for which
Consolidated Aircraft used to get 3¢ a
gallon, is now being converted into
cutting oil worth 27¢ a gallon. Since it
costs about 20¢ to refine a gallon, the
company saves 7¢ a gallon instead of
3¢. Even yet we are not satisfied. We
expect to recrack the oil and reuse it in
engine tests. We had been selling our
scrap wood as such. Now we are
recovering two tons of bolts, nuts,
washers and screws from the wood
before it is sold and are seriously
thinking of converting the wood itself
into wood flour, from which roofing
paper and insulation can be made. It
takes 80 girls, working in two shifts, to
sort rivets, screws and nuts which are
swept up from the floor daily at a rate
of about a ton a day. During a single
recent month we salvaged 209,631
pounds of bomber parts which various
inspectors had rejected. We seek the
causes of the "rejects," try to have the
defects corrected and so finally
okayed. Four hundred tons of
aluminum are saved monthly by
cutting scraps into sub-standard sizes
― anything from two inches by six
inches to 36 inches square ― which
we use in building Consolidated
bombers. Our Salvage Director has
become so enthused over the results
accomplished by our salvage program
that he now personally saves string,
paper bags and old razor blades."
THE HUGE Glenn Martin plants in
Maryland discovered that about one-
third of the aluminum alloys used in
the construction of Martin planes ends
up as scrap in the form of clippings,
blankings, punchings, shearings,
turnings and borings. Thus, for every
two Martin bombers built, enough
scrap is unavoidably created to build a
third ― provided the eight different
alloys are kept separate. Segregation
of scrap is one of the secrets of salvage
operations. Mixing metals is like
mixing sugar and salt. When that
happens you get a substance that is
good neither for sweetening nor
seasoning. So with mixed metals.
Mixed, they cannot be turned right
back into production. Hence, at North
American Aviation, brightly colored
discs are hung above the machines,
each disc denoting a different type of
metal. Near the machines are barrels
painted in corresponding colors.
Salvage workmen clean the metal from
the machines and deposit it in the
various barrels, according to color.
At Bell Aircraft too, proper
segregation of scrap is regarded as
vitally important, as by keeping each
type of metal separate, the smelter is
saved the expensive, time-consuming
task of removing some elements and
adding others to bring the mixture into
a proper alloy. By Bell's segregation
process the smelter is able to convert
its scrap into "original specification"
aircraft alloys with little or no trouble.
Every week at least 1500 necessary
and hard-to-get Cleco clamps are
salvaged from sweepings at the Bell
plants. Elusive aluminum rivets,
dropped in the heat of production, are
saved and sent to a nearby vocational
school where they are used by students
in rivet practice, serving a highly
useful purpose in the training of future
aircraft workers.
How seriously the working
personnel of aircraft plants are taking
the salvaging of scrap as a means of
doing their bit toward winning the war
is well illustrated by an editorial which
recently appeared in the house organ
issued by Republic Aviation, out on
Long Island. It begins with the
explanation that an employee handed
the house organ editor an envelope
with the remark "Here's an editorial
for you." Opening the envelope, the
editor found it contained seventy-eight
3/16 flat-head rivets ― two good
handfuls of them. The editorial which
resulted read as follows: "Those 78
rivets had been picked up on the
Republic parking lot, picked up in an
area of six feet, where they had been
scattered by some clown who is lazy,
thoughtless and selfish, and in all
probability as un-American as any
Nazi saboteur. "Seventy-eight 3/16th
rivets cost Republic and the American
taxpayers ― us guys, brother ― about
50 cents. They are ten ounces of
aluminum. They are capacity for a
machine a half-minute or so, in an
overworked aluminum plant.
"Some bird took too many from the
rotobin. When the quit whistle blew he
still had them. He ducked for the
parking lot and when he got there he
felt the rivets in his pocket. He didn't
want to ride home with them there.
Too heavy. He'd only have to bring
them back.
"Conservation, saving materials?
Trying to win this war?
"He never had ideas like that. The
hell with the rivets, he thought.
"Some of us who have kid brothers,
or sons, or pals in Ireland, England,
Australia or Alaska ― or maybe in a
Jap prison camp ― would like to catch
up with that guy. Some of us who have
authority, would like to fire him right
out of Republic.
"Some of us who don't have any
gold on our badges but who have a
pretty fair right cross, would like to
poke him right in the nose.
"Keep it up, fellow. We'll catch up
with you."
While that sort of a spirit prevails
among the men who staff the big
aviation plants who can doubt that
victory lies ahead? By the thousands
and tens of thousands they seem to
have adopted the motto in vogue at the
Glenn Martin plants: "Aim straight at
the scrap bins and score a hit on the
Axis!"
Ingenious as our conservationists
have already proven themselves, we'll
be doing things yet undreamed of
before the fires of this war are finally
banked. We'll be doing them not
merely to save an enormous quantity
of basic materials in the present
emergency, but because no up-and-
coming, on-its-toes business can afford
to be unmindful of the era of peace
and commerce that will follow. And
perhaps, in the final analysis, we'll be
doing them not so much for financial
profit as for the Yankee joy of
plucking full-fledged bombers, trans-
ports and other aircraft out of the
ashcans. When even the "by-products"
of bombers are being turned into more
bombers, we are learning the very
practical lessons of thrift, a newly-
found virtue that Americans can
undoubtedly hold onto long after this
war is ended.
This article was originally published in
the February, 1943, issue of Flying
Aces magazine, vol 43, no 3, pp 16-17,
79-81.