1918.] The N.Z. Journal of Science and Technology. 83 
but the difficulty of obtaining sufficient scrap at once crops up. There 
is, of course, already a demand in New Zealand for more mild-steel and 
wrought-iron scrap than can be obtained, and, while a small foundry could 
afford to pay a good enough price to ensure its supply, a small rolling-mill 
is differently situated. If the electric furnace could decarbonize and then 
refine cheap pig of the white variety such as can be bought at ordinary 
times for about £2 a ton f.o.b. English ports, then the solution is in sight. 
But is it possible to do this ? Freak combinations of the electric furnace 
with the converter or open hearth have frequently been patented, but the 
boil that accompanies the removal of carbon by air or ore is bound to 
seriously increase the wear of linings if carried out in an electric furnace. 
The obvious solution is the preparation of molten decarbonized metal in 
the cupola and small side-blown converter, followed by a refining treatment 
in an electric furnace. The cheapest grade of white pig could be used 
(such metal, for instance, as will be obtained by any small blast furnace 
using a briquetted or sintered product of Taranaki ironsand, if only such 
metal could be obtained for 50s. instead of 100s. per ton) with any scrap 
that is offering, and the sulphur and phosphorus could be fluxed out with 
the expenditure of about 400 units per ton (or, say, 8s. 4d. per ton for 
electric energy). With the greatly increased output which would result from 
the addition of even a small rolling-mill very much, lower charges for molten 
metal would be ensured, and the small foundry would then become a pro¬ 
fitable side-issue of the mill. In such an enterprise it is probable that 
most of the ingots could be melted and poured at night, but the dazzling 
picture of how many millions a year could be saved thereby in the cost 
of electric current can only be properly painted by an electrical engineer. 
The more prosaic task of showing that the electric furnace is now a 
reasonable commercial proposition for a small cast-steel foundry in New 
Zealand has been, let usffiope, successfully aimed at in this paper. 
One point of a general nature remains to be ventilated—the location, . 
quality, and distribution of moulding-sands. This is a subject on which 
information is badly wanted. Recently the way has been cleared con¬ 
siderably by research work published in England upon the essential qualities 
of these sands, and something is now known of the chemical analysis and 
physical structure desirable. The Geological Survey Department should 
get into touch with the foundrymen and obtain samples of the sands and 
mixtures at present in use in New Zealand foundries. Armed with know¬ 
ledge of the analysis and structure of these sands, the surveyors of that 
Department would be in a position to recognize likely deposits when they 
came across them, and it would be a simple matter to arrange for 
exhaustive trials in practical work of any sands approaching the quality 
suitable for either steel or iron moulding. Thus important information 
of real industrial value would be made available, and a forward step be 
made in the great crusade on which depends so much the future welfare 
of the whole British nation—the application of industrial knowledge to 
science, and the consequent killing of that spent attitude of “ splendid 
isolation ” from anything practical or useful which has characterized the 
majority of our scientific workers in the past and prevented full use being 
made of the magnificent discoveries of their genius. Possibly it is a fact 
of good omen for this Dominion that to-day the first and foremost scientist 
of the world in the field of foundry-work is a New-Zealander, a chemist 
educated in our technical schools and University, whose name is worthy 
of being inscribed beside Rutherford’s on our yet scanty roll of fame— 
Dr. Mellor, whose colossal help towards supplying Britain with an adequate 
output of munitions will surely be suitably recognized by the nation in the 
near future. 
