Chicago Foundry

Right in town is a metal foundry.  They have blast furnaces, giant cranes, molten steel, carbon rods the size of trees that get electrically introduced under high voltage into the steel.  Eric is a welder journeyman, so the two of us stopped off at the foundry after the game.  We stood in the doorway in awe.  It felt like being in Pittsburgh during the steel revolution, except for the lack of people - many things now are robotic.  We spent almost a half hour just watching molten steel in hoppers being poured into small ceramic molds and tested for chemical content ratios, listening to the industrial sounds of arcing and smelling ozone.  You could feel the heat coming from the kettles, and some of the hopper cars (used to carry kettles across the street to be annealed) were still warm.  Sometimes they let the public walk around inside, but I guess not tonight.  They were going to pour a kettle in three hours - a sight I'm told is well worth watching: sparks fly everywhere - but we weren't going to stick around that long :)  I was utterly fascinated; Eric could really appreciate the inner-workings.