Sights and sounds in mysterious places
Like the magic phrase Open Sesame, the words, “I’m with magazine X and I
am writing an article about topic Y” have opened doors to some cool cook’s tours, from Toronto Pearson's air traffic control tower to the underground mysteries of North America's only tidal power plant in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. Here is a small sampling of the sights I have
recorded.
These mysterious machines, in the Beavers Dental plant in Morrisburg, Ontario, make tiny dental drill bits. They lurch around (well, not all over town!) like drunken robots.
A huge milling machine turns slabs of aluminum into aircraft wing components in a Bombardier plant in Montreal.
A row of presses in the Montreal Gazette printing plant. I waited five years for them to build this place before I could do my story.
This bizarre machine in the Sport Maska Inc. plant in St-Jean sur Richelieu, Quebec, performs some of the 150 operations required to make hockey skates.
This 91.4-metre long paper machine in the Belgo paper mill in Shawinigan, Quebec, produces a 15,455-kilogram roll of paper every hour and a half. If I recall correctly, this machine was built in 1929. The mill is now closed.
A worker moves aircraft landing gear at the Messier-Dowty manufacturing plant north of Montreal. I feel like Mr. Rogers when I visit and write about places like this.
Eye to eye with the Jacques Cartier bridge from the top of the Vampire roller coaster at La Ronde, Montreal. While up there the wind began to blow and the Vampire started to vibrate. The things I do to get a story!
This is not water. It is fibreglass made from blasting melted marbles with flames at Manson Insulation Inc., in Brossard, Quebec. Now shuttered, the plant used enough marbles (10,000 tonnes) every year to fill seven Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Fat billets of zinc are the reward at the end of a long refining process at Canadian Electrolytic Zinc Limited in Valleyfield, Quebec.
Images and text Copyright
© Carroll McCormick 2013
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Very nice images!
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