The Best Way to Celebrate Your 120th Birthday is With a New Slide Bar Part

On our Engineering at Vulcan page, we posted this general arrangement of the Vulcan #2 dated 1887.

2-Steam-Pile-Hammer-1887 — The first extant layout of the Vulcan #2 Hammer, dated 9 February 1887. It’s probably the first extant layout of the Warrington-Vulcan hammer. Until about World War I, it was common practice for Vulcan to lay out the general arrangement and then the shop produce much of the hammer from just that drawing. It’s an indication of both the skill and the decision making ability of those actually producing the product, and also probably of the involvement of those doing the design work.

Little did we suspect that we’d need that drawing, but then these photos from Crofton Diving of Portsmouth, VA, arrived:

The hammer in question is Vulcan S/N 116, originally sold to the Florida East Coat Railroad (not far from the West Palm Beach facility) in 1897. The distinctive “open” slide bar design was changed about that time to what is on virtually every Warrington-Vulcan and Super-Vulcan hammer made since. Vulcan Foundation Equipment was able to make the spare parts Crofton required from the original detail drawings.

“Planned obsolescence” wasn’t the Vulcan way in 1897 or afterwards, which is why a 120-year old product is still driving pile and being useful to the contractor.