Found a 50-year-old boiler plate stamp in an old factory basement in Pittsburgh last week

Had to pull a steam header in a building from the 1920s and the original plate was still readable, which got me thinking about how much harder it must have been to hand-rivet those things back then - anyone else ever find something that old still in service?

3 comments

3 Comments

logan5251mo ago

...and that's the thing about old equipment, it was built to last. I remember my old man telling me about a water main he found in a church basement from the 1880s, still stamped with the foundry name and everything. He said the threads were so tight you couldn't budge them with a modern pipe wrench. It makes you wonder what kind of shortcuts we take today that'll make our stuff look like junk in 100 years, right?

grant4781mo ago

That 1880s pipe was probably cast iron with lead joints, so yeah it'll last forever, but it'll also crack if you look at it wrong. I mean, we could still build stuff like that today if we wanted to pay triple and wait around for six months.

max_brown1mo ago

Yeah but has that old water main ever been tested against a plastic one for vibration resistance or soil movement? Those old pipes might be tight but they're brittle as glass when the ground shifts. Modern stuff flexes and doesn't crack as easy. Plus we got better ways to join pipes now that don't require a week of hand threading in a damp basement. Old man nostalgia is nice and all but there's a reason we don't use horses for road work anymore.