Visited a salvage yard in Gary yesterday and saw 3 boilers from the 1920s still intact

I was poking around Gary Iron & Metal looking for some scrap pipe flanges and stumbled on these old Heine boiler drums sitting in a back lot. They were stamped 1927 and had these huge riveted seams you just don't see anymore... made me think about how much stronger stuff was built back then. Has anyone else come across old boilers like that in a salvage yard lately?

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the_jana4d ago

Oh man, those riveted seams are something else. My grandpa used to tell me stories about working on old steam engines back in the 50s and how they'd hammer those rivets red hot into place. Found a similar one a few years ago at a scrapyard outside Toledo, it was from a 1918 ship boiler and still had the builder's plate on it. The yard guys didn't even know what it was, they just thought it was a big metal tube. Ended up selling it to a museum guy who restores old locomotives, paid me like 200 bucks for the plate alone.