Emily Mystery Cache
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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This cache is not located at the listed co-ordinates!
This is the first of a 6 cache series commemorating the Port Kembla Blast Furnaces.
This cache is not located at the listed co-ordinates!
The listed co-ordinates are those of Port Kembla No. 1 Blast Furnace built by Australian Iron and Steel in 1928.
This is the first of a 6 cache series commemorating the Port Kembla Blast Furnaces. The full series will take finders to locations where six historical blast furnaces operated in NSW. These enterprises met with varying degrees of success.
Blast Furnaces are sometimes known by the name of the person who first lit them. No. 1 Furnace at Port Kembla was first lit by Mrs. Emily Hoskins on August 29, 1928.
In 1928, the Hoskins family relocated their iron and steel business from
Lithgow to Port Kembla. The building of No.1 Blast Furnace was the most
critical capital works of the entire move.
The design for the first blast furnace was obtained from a United States
company, Freyn Engineering, of Chicago and included many advances over
the design of the old furnaces at Lithgow.
The furnace had a nominal capacity of 800 tonnes per day (or roughly twice
the combined capacity of the two Lithgow blast furnaces). It was equipped
with three hot blast stoves and a steel stack 73 metres high. Incoming
materials in hopper trucks could be discharged directly into steel bins. From
these bins, an electric scale car could weigh out the materials and convey
them to a skip for hoisting to the top of the furnace. Here, a double set of
bells enabled the materials to be fed into the furnace with minimum escape
of gases. The upper of the two bells could be rotated to achieve even
distribution of the material. The whole of this charging operation was under
the control of one man per shift, compared to about 30 men per shift at
Lithgow.
A new power-house was built near the blast furnace and housed the blowing
engines and included modern boilers with chain-grate stokers which could
burn coke fines (previously a surplus product) or blast furnace gas,
a new Brown-Boveri turbo blower was provided with the massive Thompson
engine from Lithgow as a standby unit and turbo-alternators to supply the
plants electricity requirements.
The furnace has since been demolished, and all that remains is a buried plug of solidified metal.
The combined production of all 6 furnaces that have operated at Port Kembla has quite recently passed the 200,000,000 tonnes mark. Emily's contribution was 10,174,667 tonnes produced over 14747 operating days in eight campaigns. The furnace last operated in for a short campaign of 72 days in 1978 producing 77,158 tonnes.
The cache is located within about 100m of the site where Mr Lahiff built his Mt Pleasant experimental furnace in 1882. The exact site of the furnace is very near the intersection of Binda and Dallas Streets but is a residential holding today. (I wonder whether the residents have any knowledge of this.) The furnace was built near the junction of the Mt Pleasant railway and the Mt Pleasant Coal Company’s tramway incline. The incline was used to haul coal from the company’s Mt Pleasant mine. Lahiff used coke produced from the spontaneous combustion of coal dumps and produced about 10 tons of pig iron. The ore was from deposits extracted from along the Illawarra escarpment. They were described as ferruginous shale, clayband, carbonate of iron and brown hematite varying from 20-50% iron.
The furnace is described by Southern and Platt in “Ironmaking in Australia 1848-1914” in the following terms.
‘The furnace stood on a six feet square sandstone base four feet high. In this was a recess 21 inches deep forming the hearth into which was a 16x20 inch opening for the taphole.
Above this sandstone base was erected a cylindrical brick furnace bound for reinforcement with the material most readily available to the owner, a colliery haulage rope. This brick structure was 6 feet high and 6 feet in diameter.’
The accompanying photo dates from a 1943 inspection. By 1955, only the sandstone hearth remained and everything was gone by 1970.
The furnace’s smelting trial was initially considered successful and two schemes for commercial scale ironmaking were proposed. Both were costed in considerable detail and seemed viable in all aspects except the quality and availability of local ores.
To find the coordinates of the cache location:
a) Calculate how many tonnes Emily produced per operating day. From this, subtract 100 x the no. of blast furnaces there have been at Port Kembla. This gives you a three digit number = ABC.
b) If Emily's fuel rate during her final campaign was 557 kg/tonne hot metal, then she used DEF tonnes of coke (fuel) per day.
Ground Zero can be found at:
S 34 24.ABC
E 150 52.DEF
The cache CANNOT be approached from the expressway.
The whole area is a No Parking zone between 8.30 am and 6.00 pm on weekdays as it is close to the University of Wollongong. The area will also be a high muggle area in these times.
Finders should note the three digits on the back of the small photograph of the experimental Mt. Pleasant furnace which is in the cache. These provide digits for the south coordinates of the cache commemorating No 5 Blast Furnace, "Lady McLennan".
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Ab uvagf