The Lake County star. [volume] (Chase, Mich.) 1873-current, 1874-03-05
FOR THE YOUNG FOLKS.
A Curious Pair OF Jaws.

Don't you think Il must be curl
Gus pair Of Jaws that can bite of q
chunk of iron as easily as you can
bite stick of candyYFrfs1
You can hardly believe it? Wait
till l tell you.
One OF the most interesting places
i ever visited was q room filled with
these monsters with. the sharp steel
jaws, called nail-machines.
In the first place, the noise made
by several OF these machines in one
room Is something absolutely fearful.
l wanted to stuff my ears with cotton;
but l thought that would not be very
civil to my guide, and after little L
got used to it, and soon found my
self SO much interested that ] really
forgot the noise.
Some machines nip off the tacks
so fast that stream of finished tacks
runs down a tin tube into reservoir
thousands In minute.
Listen to the ticking of the clock,
and reflect that every time 10 ticks at
least twenty tacks are snapped off.
But i must tell you how they do it.
First, the iron bar, as it comes from
the iron-wOrks, is put between i'm
mense rollers, which fiatten il out as
nicely as q cook can roll out pie-crust
with q rolling-pin. The bar of iron is
thus made into sheet, just thick
enough for the nails they want to
make. 1t goes next to the Sitting
machine, which makes no more fuss
about Sitting it into the proper width
for nails than your scissors make
about cutting paper,
1t is cut little longer than the nail
is to be, because the heads are to be
made.
When the strips of iron are all ready
a man takes one and slips the end in
to the steel jaws L told you of.
These jaws are worked by steam
power, and instantly they bite off q
nail, while q furious little hammer
springs out suddenly, and with one
blow on the end of the bit of iron
flattens it, and thus makes head.
If you want to know what blow
that must be, take piece Of iron and
try to pound head on it yourself.
The instant the head is made, the
Jaws open, and the nail drops out fin
ished. or course it is done much
quicker than I.have been telling you,
tor machine can make brads (Which
/ needn't tell the boys are small nails
without heads) at the rate of three
thousand minute.
1t is said that figures won't lie,"
and L hope they won't, but i must
admit it Is hard to believe that story.
After the tacks come out of the
machine they are "blued," as it Is
called. 1t is done by heating them
in an oven or on an iron plate.
Then they go to the packing-rOom,
where girl can weigh and put into
papers two thousand papers of tacks
in day.
That's another tough story, but my
guide assured me 1t was true.
How many kinds of nails can you
name? You will probably be sur
prised to hear that two hundred kinds
of nails are made In one factory, be-
ginning with spikes which weigh
nearly half a pound each, and ending
with the tiniest kind of tacks not u
quarter of an inch long.
Men didn't always have machines
to make nails for them, and of course
they had to make them by hand.
That was no such easy matter; and,
i'm fact, they couldn't make them OF
cold iron, but had to heat every one.
In some parts of England they are
very slow to get machinery, and the
ignorant people, thinking their trade
is to be spoiled, will break up and
destroy any machinery that Is
brought there. So they work at nail
making as their grandfathers did.
Every man has q little fOrge-such
as you have seen i'm a blacksmith's
shop if you live in a village-and a
small anvil. Every child is put to
work to make nails at eight or nine
years of age, because they earn so
little that every one of a family must
help earn his bread. OF course these
children have no time to learn to
neither read or write,
This is the way they make the
nails: They buy iron rods just the
right.size for the nails they make
for one family always makes the
same size of nails. They take one o:
these rods, heat it red-hot at the
forge, lay it on the anvil, and cut off
the length of nail; then laying
away the rest of the rod, they take
the piece they have cut off, pound II
out to a point at one end, and pound
on bead at the other. A very slow
operation, you see, when you think
of how the machines snap them off
cold. "A whole family scarcely ever
earns more than five dollars week
at the work, and part of that has to
go for the coal it uses.
One of the nail factories in our
country that have read about uses
one hundred and fifty tons of iron I'm
a week, all of which is bitten up into