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Long Pond Ironworks Virtual Tour

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Water Wheels
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These are the two Hewitt era water wheel houses. Originally, each wheel had a wood frame house that also included the air pumping mechanism and stoves to heat them in winter time. These are the last two wheels built here. These overshot wheels were built in the 1880s, they were 25 feet in diameter and 8 feet wide. This is the most efficient type of water wheel and these two were capable of producing over 200 horsepower. In the 1880s you no longer had the wheels operating a simple bellows to blow air, this was the age of industrial machinery! These wheels ran two giant horizontal blowing engines that worked much like a bicycle pump. The wheel axle has a crank arm that revolves with the axle, moving a push rod back and forth in the pump chamber and creating air pressure in both directions. This air was now piped into a giant radiator system that preheated the air before it entered the furnace as a hot air blast. The northern wheel was rebuilt in 1995.

Water Wheels as ruins

Wheels today under cover


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