Forsyth, Miller, and Co.

FORSYTH, MILLER, & CO., Cast-Malleable and Steel Founders, 44, Broad Street, Mile End, Glasgow.

    This firm deserves special notice in these pages on account of their speciality of cast-malleable metal, which was matured by them about thirty years ago, and has since proved itself superior, in some cases, even to steel castings where resistance to heavy strains has to be provided for.

    The firm is an old one, having been founded in the year i860 by McHaffee and Forsyth. The partners are at present Mr. John Ritchie Miller, who joined the firm in 1863, and his son, Mr. Edward Caird Miller, under the designation, since 1871, of Forsyth, Miller, and Co. The foundry is of large extent, very roomy and airy, containing all the usual moulding and casting appliances, and supplemented by extensive workshops for dressing and passing the castings. In the yard are eight annealing stoves with lofty chimneys, etc. Castings of from 12 to 14 feet in length can be annealed in these stoves, and practically there is no limit to the thickness that can be dealt with. About seventy hands are employed in the works.

    The front of the premises is utilized for offices, the private offices and laboratory occupying the second floor. In the laboratory is kept the chemicals which are employed in the process. These are mixed in the required proportions, moistened with water, and packed into hollow cast-iron balls, which, when filled, are plugged with wood and placed along with the charges of metal in the Cupola ; the effect of the admixture is to make the metal susceptible of the through and through passage of oxygen in the annealing process ; whereas, in ordinary annealing, only the surface is affected with the oxygen. The metal so made is found to be very tough and malleable. Metal castings have been produced in these works with a tension as high as 28 tons to the square inch (five or six times that of ordinary castings).

    Messrs. Forsyth, Miller, and Co.’s castings are also solid, genuinely soft, and malleable through and through. Whatever may be the price paid for steel castings, the chance of their brittleness must be accepted, for to test them may be to destroy them. It will be readily apparent, then, that the malleable metal of this firm, despite the “rush” to steel in every department of industry, is always in requisition, and evidences are not wanting that it may be increasingly so. The castings of France have a high reputation in this country, yet the Paris agency of this firm controls a wide connection in that country. The firm, too, of which Dr. Siemens was a member — Messrs. Siemens Brothers, of Charlton, Kent, who may be supposed to know something of steel — receive their castings from these works for certain parts of their submarine torpedo work. They prefer the certain malleability, soundness, and strength of these Glasgow castings to the general uncertainty and honeycombing of steel castings so called.

    For hydraulic cylinders, dredger-bucket backs and propellers, the malleable metal of this firm has no equal, as, indeed, it has none for all those uses in which resistance to tension or concussion is desirable. We notice that, in 1876, this firm supplied screw propellers for two whaling ships, built at Port Glasgow, for Messrs. Alexander Stephen and Sons, Dundee. One of these was the Thetis, purchased, in 1884, by the American Government for the Greely Relief Expedition, and was severely tested among the “floe” ice which fringes the frozen straits through which it was necessary to proceed to reach the survivors of Greely’s party. Not a blade gave way, and we have it on the authority of the Messrs. Stephens that their vessels, fitted with propellers of the M.C. Iron of Messrs. Forsyth, Miller, and Co., after continuous service for many years in the Arctic Seas, have suffered no damage in that exposed part — the propeller. One of these, the Aurora, has seen fifteen years’ service, having been fitted with her present propeller in 1876.

    It is not necessary, however, to multiply instances, but it is useful, we hope, in an age taken with a steel-making mania, to point out that the above firm is in possession of a process for making malleable cast-iron superior to steel for many purposes where strength and unbreakableness are primary requisites.

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