Facts not opinions

Back from Cambridge, I have finally made it to the Kirkaldy Testing Museum in Southwark Street. A museum which is open the first Sunday of each month, tours bookable through Eventbrite, or something of that sort. Snap looking east, lifted from Street View.

It turned out to be a day for engineering works on the Waterloo side, and I eventually worked out that the way forward was train to Balham, followed by tube to Borough, followed by Bullingdon. Similar to the route sometimes taken to the Barbican, which seems a long way away now, but it can't be more than a couple of years, if that.

Mask wearing poor at Epsom Station, rather better on the train. On which I managed to fall asleep and only woke up just as it was leaving Balham. A moments panic, then the previous evening's research kicked in and I remembered that I could get a tube to Blackfriars from Victoria. Which turned out to be straightforward and quick, and I walked across Blackfriars Bridge with time in hand, time which I thought to take refreshment of some sort in, but having wandered about a bit, didn't.

Impressed by the gardening at the foot of one of the towers on the north side of Southwark Street, with the building just to the left of the target museum visible through the passage.

The testing company ran from 1865 and drifted to a close in 1974. The museum occupied the ground floor and basement of the building occupied by the company for most of this time and was run by a team of volunteers, some of whom got to play with the toys.

Pride of place was a huge contraption for testing samples of steel: compression and tension as you might expect, but also twisting and bending. Test pieces held in place by hammering in cunningly shaped steel wedges. Originally driven by high pressure water drawn from a network of pipes running under the commercial parts of London: what you did before electricity supplies could be relied on. The trusty, a retired IT man, told us that such things were to be found in many large cities, both home and overseas, from around 1850 to 1950 - but not finally closing, in this case, until 1977. See, for example, reference 5.

I learned that, at the time the contraption was built, steel was a fairly new and unreliable material, apt to vary a good deal from place to place within a piece and across pieces. So it was good to test as large a piece as possible. Things have got better now and testing much smaller pieces mostly suffices.

I learned that, just as with concrete testing, you tested pieces of steel of a standard size and shape to destruction. Also that steel bars can stretch quite a way before they break, maybe 10% of their length. 

Furthermore, I was pleased to find that there was a small concrete testing department in the basement, complete with cube moulds (the sort of thing noticed at reference 4), a small curing tank and a cube crusher. Plus various other bits and bobs, not all of which I knew about and including the open cone used for the quick & dirty slump test. They also worked on bricks and ceramics - these last possibly large electrical insulators.

Plus various smaller pieces of testing equipment, handed on from the National Physical Laboratory, which had no further use for them.

One of Kirkaldy's bread and butter items was the regular testing of important chains. Boring to do, but it did help pay the rent.

Another trusty, a retired lady physicist, demonstrated the plastic tape snapping machine. This tape, maybe a centimetre across, snapped at about 150kg, snapping by exploding into a forest of thin fibres. The stuff was a film, not woven, but did have a grain. One of the people on tour told us that ropes snapped in much the same way. Bing not very good at this sort of thing, and while Google could not turn up a snap of an exploding tape, he did turn up various expensive looking tensile test machines, including the one above, snapped from reference 6. 

DNV got a mention, people I came across in connection with IT department ISO quality certification, all the rage at the end of the last century, but not Sandberg, people for whom I once worked and who were, I believe very into steel. Although a good deal of their bread and butter came from materials for roads: concrete, tar macadam and their ingredients. Which is where I was and where my interest in concrete originated. Until quite recently of Grosvenor Gardens, SW1. Still up and running, but slumming it at SW4 and reference 7.

Picked up a couple of souvenir booklets on exit, references 2 and 3. An excellent place. Not one to visit too often, but it will be interesting to see how they get on. Will the industrial heritage people take them seriously? One can imagine that there are probably textile machinery museums up north, where they used to have the mills. They have such places in Ontario, Canada, as can be seen at reference 11.

One of the booklets told me that some of the testing machinery is celebrated in the stained glass windows of the Christ Church we failed to visit in the course of the occasion noticed at reference 1. Clearly time for another visit, perhaps checking when it is open this time.

Pulled a Bullingdon and pedalled off to Borough. Where I found a new-to-me Italian (Sicilian flavour) grocery. They didn't have much bread, but I did get a bottle of Sicilian wine and some Sicilian sausage, hand made in London. Called salsicciamo, came in spirals of 400g each. One and a half spirals, lightly and quickly fried on both sides, taken with boiled vegetables, was more than enough for the two of us and did very well indeed. The balance went into sausage rolls the next day, with the quite decent white rolls coming from our local Costcutter, now mixed up with the Co-op. Which also did very well; different league from the things that Gregg's are pleased to call sausage rolls.

Their website, reference 8, might have had trouble finding the store, but they found the sausage fast enough. We shall be back for more.

While across the road we had the church of St. George the Martyr. I had a quick look inside, but it was cranking up for a service, with men and women, possibly from Nigeria, wearing very flashy looking, full length white robes and hats to match. As a non-believer, it did not seem right to stay on in tourist mode. When I got home, BH thought that they were probably the choir. In any event, two more of them were coming out of the tube station opposite as I went in. Sadly, the church website tells me nothing about who they might have been.

Pit stop at Balham where I took a bacon chapatti at Full Fat in Chestnut Grove, that is to say on the way to what used to be a den of iniquity, then the Tup (a sort of sheep) and now the Regent. Bacon chapatti not bad, but I could have done with more chapatti and less bacon (and less salt). Next time. I passed on the Regent on this occasion. According to the record, the last time I used the place was in 2017 and noticed at reference 9.

I scored just one aeroplane from the platform at Balham Station, this being the middle of Sunday afternoon. Just thing how many I would have seen in the old days.

Waiting at Sutton, I may have picked up from their modest waiting room library a book of a dozen or so old engravings of Kew Gardens, sampled above. Or was it Raynes Park, a relative of all the botanical books I have picked up from there over the past couple of months? From which I might say that I am slowly getting to know something about the classification of plants, rather different from the classifications - say of occupation or disease - that I am more familiar with.

Engravings nicely reproduced on pages of fourteen by ten inches. Steel or copper engravings, so perusal will complement the efforts noticed at reference 10. Not to mention getting to know about the Kew Gardens of old.

The last train of the day, the one from Sutton to Epsom, was quite crowded, although standard of masking had risen since the morning. And one young lady was carrying a handbag, the side of which looked like a Lego board. Not quite what Google has turned up, but such a thing appears to be quite an expensive accessory.

PS: I couldn't pass up this fine illustration of a concrete slump test, lifted from reference 7 below. The cone mentioned above in action. A quick and easy test which can be done on the spot, where the concrete is being poured. The bar being used to mark the slump, centre top, is probably the standard bar used for the standard tamping of the wet concrete while it is still in the cone. I remember two of them, with 25 strokes from each hand, but maybe I have got that wrong, with the neck of the cone looking quite narrow this evening. Perhaps I am getting muddled up with cubes, where there were two rather shorter bars, about a foot long and about two centimetres square in section at the business end. 

References 

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/09/cheese-on-foot.html.

Reference 2: David Kirkaldy and his Testing and Experimental Works - Christopher Rule - 2012.

Reference 3: Facts not Opinions: 150 years of testing which changed the world - Crichton, Hogarth, Jenkins and MacGillivray - 2015. A rather more glossy affair.

Reference 4: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-two-part-dream.html.

Reference 5: https://www.subbrit.org.uk/features/hydraulic-power-in-london/.

Reference 6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58hw2QxxDro.

Reference 7: https://www.sandberg.co.uk/.

Reference 8: https://www.prezzemoloevitale.co.uk/.

Reference 9: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/08/tempest-one.html.

Reference 10: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/tate-britain.html.

Reference 11: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/10/ancient-and-modern.html.

Reference 12: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kirkaldy. The man himself.