The Iron Moulder

1860 · Moulding Shop · Work 362 of 1,871

The Iron Moulder, 1860, Moulding Shop

A foundry moulder ramming moulding sand around a wooden pattern in a floor pit, the man in a collarless shirt with rolled sleeves, a leather apron, heavy cloth trousers and hobnailed boots, a cloth cap, beside his knee a hand riddle that is a shallow round wooden hoop with a wire mesh bottom like a flat sieve, held in both hands to sift sand, a hand bellows for blowing loose sand, rows of clamped flasks waiting for the pour.

What it was used for
The moulder bedded the wooden pattern in green sand, rammed the sand, drew the pattern, set the core, closed the flask and poured iron from the cupola; then came knock-out and fettling. The work was paid by the piece: according to Craig Heron, by the 1890s nine-tenths of North America's stove-plate moulders were reputedly on piecework, and few of them made the castings for an entire stove. The Bureau of Labor Statistics gives average 1860 day rates from $1.57 in Connecticut to $1.87 in Maryland on a sixty-hour week; Illinois reports $3.00 with no hours given. Britain's Health and Safety Executive still lists foundry sands, fettlings and kiln linings as sources of silica dust: silicosis, lung cancer, COPD.
What was new
Nothing about hand moulding was new in 1860; green sand, core and flask are centuries older, and power-driven moulding machines were only tried from the late 1880s. Two things were new: the scale, because cheap cast iron turned the casting into a mass component, and the organisation. On 5 July 1859 the moulders held their first national convention at Philadelphia, and in January 1860 at Albany they formally agreed to form the National Union of Iron Molders; by 1866 its successor had 137 local unions and just under 10,000 members, said to be about nine-tenths of all journeymen iron moulders in the United States. In Britain the trade had been organised for fifty years by then: the Friendly Iron Moulders' Society dates from 1809. The skill all of it rested on could not be written down - mechanisation took another quarter century to begin.

Further reading