Manufacture of Cement Pipe 81 



skilled laborers, — the mortar maker, the mortar feeder, two carriers, 

 and one man to sprinkle the pipe in the curing and stack yard. After 

 all the laborers had become accustomed to their work, the foreman 

 was disjiensed witii. \\'hile making 18 and 20-inch pipe two extra 

 laborers were required. 



To protect the freshly-made pipe from sun and rain, a shelter 

 was built just to one side of the pipe machine. It was constructed 

 of poles, branches, and river brush and is called, locally, a raniada. 

 It is 65 feet by 75 feet in size. The frontispiece is a view of the 

 pipe yard in August, 1917. It shows the ramada in the background. 



OTHER PIPE MACHINES 



The date of the first manufacture of cement pipe by machine is 

 uncertain. Cement pipe was being used largely for sewers in Maine 

 about 1870. An advertisement in an old directory of Maine of 1868 

 contains the commendation of a prominent architect who states that 

 he had known of the use of cement pipe in Boston for 30 years. The 

 pipe made by the advertiser, in the city of Portland, was of various 

 sizes up to 18 inches in diameter, both circular and egg-shaped in 

 section. It is claimed that this man had a machine for making pipe 

 and that the principle of packing was similar to that of the Sanders 

 machine described on page 86. At that time natural cement was 

 used exclusively for the pipe, Portland cement being too costly, and 

 probably the pipe was of very inferior quality. 



THE SHERMAN 



About 1885 the Sherman patent sewer pipe machine was de- 

 signed and built at Omaha, Neb. It was moved from there to 

 Brooklyn, where for twenty years it supplied that city with cement 

 sewer pipe in great quantities. The machine employed the tamping 

 principle, and was the prototype of the Thomas-Hammond machine 

 described on page 84. The Sherman machine had eight metal 

 tampers and an inside core which was pulled upward when the 

 forms were filled. The outside form rotated with the table on 

 which it stood. The smaller sizes of pipe, of 6, 9, and 12-inch 

 diameters, were circular in section, and the larger sizes, 15, 18, and 

 24-inches in diameter, were of egg-shaped section, which is the ideal 

 section for important sewers. All sizes had fiat bases. The wall 

 thicknesses were 1 inch for the 9-inch pipe, 1^ inches for the 15-inch 

 pipe, and 1^ inches for the 24-inch pipe. They were made of cement, 

 sand, and broken trap rock in proportions 1 : 1^ : 23^. Much of the 



