Taking Advantage

0 Comments | New Straits Times, Jul 30, 2010 | by Jeeva Arulampalam

GUINNESS Anchor Bhd expects a low single-digit growth in the overall malt liquor market (MLM) for the brewer’s current financial year, following the country’s economic recovery.

“We are looking for the market to be stable as the economic recovery is under way, with the country seeing growth in its gross domestic product (GDP),” managing director Charles Ireland said at its mobile training centre launch in Petaling Jaya yesterday.

He said GAB will continue to grow its market share for its financial year ending June 30 but did not disclose the brewer’s current market share.

GAB will release its full year results for financial year ended June 30 2010 next week.

Meanwhile, GAB launched its mobile training centre to better serve some 600 trade partners and service staff.

The mobile training unit is a bus that will travel all over Peninsular Malaysia to reach out to flagship outlets, restaurants and pubs.

“We are targeting to reach some 600 partners, and will train about 6,000 to 10,000 individuals, including bar staff,” said Ireland.

The bus is fitted with a fully-functional bar counter for service staff to learn the correct way to tap a beer, LCD screens and sound system to aid in the training sessions.

Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association, Inc., The, Sep 2006 by Wood, Paul

Introduction

This article, the second in a series of four on granite working, completes the description of the quarrying process. The final two articles, dealing with granite finishing and other granite working topics, will appear in the next two issues of The Chronicle.

Lifting and Moving

A s long ago as the 1420s, Filippo Brunelleschi had invented an ox hoist with a five-foot diameter solid elm drum that lifted a total of seventy million pounds of marble, brick, stone, and mortar during the construction of the main dome on Florence’s cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore (Figure 1). Brunelleschi also invented a balance crane that was similar to the modern tower crane with a long, horizontal, asymmetrical, counterweighted boom. Four centuries later, Solomon Willard (circa 1820s) invented or perfected a boom derrick (called a “hoisting apparatus” in Figure 2), which is in most respects the derrick used in today’s granite quarries. He also invented or perfected other stone lifting and moving devices, including the geared lifting jack, the screw hoisting jack, and the pulling jack (Figure 2). A fifteen-ton capacity double-geared lifting jack, very similar to Willard’s jack, was still being made and sold for $125 at the turn of the twentieth century (Figure 3). A modern counterpart of Willard’s pulling jack is the “tugger,” a small, one-drum, compressed-air hoist mounted on the front of a steel plate. The plate rests on the quarry floor and is secured in place by a wire rope fixed to two holes in the back corners of the plate and running around a two-inch steel anchor pin driven into the floor of the quarry. The operator stands on the back of the plate behind the hoist and controls the hoist by a lever that causes power to be applied to the drum and a second lever that brakes the drum. The tugger is most useful in areas that the boom derricks cannot reach.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century, the boom derrick did the majority of the heavy lifting at the quarry and in the finishing shed yard. The “derrick sticks” (mast and boom) were made of Douglas fir, up to four feet in diameter and up to a hundred and fifteen feet long, and were fit into derrick irons made in local foundries. The derrick sticks were shipped on three forty-foot flatcars from Oregon and Washington. Although quarrymen liked the elasticity of wood, by the end of the twentieth century steel derricks had supplanted the wood derricks. Most derricks were guy boom derricks (Figure 4) with up to a dozen 1 -inch diameter guy ropes radiating out from the guy plate at the top of the mast and secured to granite ledges or deadmen (large buried blocks of granite).

The terms cable and rope were used interchangeably to refer to steel wire cables. (We will use the term rope.) Often adjacent derricks were guyed together, from mast top to mast top, with “sky guys.” If there was not sufficient space for the guy ropes, a stiff-leg derrick (Figure 5) might be employed where the guys were replaced by two wooden poles secured to the top of the mast and anchored in the ground behind the mast. The boom, up to one hundred feet long, was attached at the bottom of the mast and swung as the mast rotated on an iron base called the “kettle.” A six-foot diameter cast iron wheel, the “bull wheel,” was fixed to the bottom of the mast and was used to rotate the mast and boom via the swing rope. The boom could be raised and lowered by the boom rope that came out of the derrick engine house roof and was reeved over the “rooster sheave” at the top of the mast
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