THE MACHINERY COURT DESCRIBED.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVII, Issue 261, 8 November 1906, Page 5

THE MACHINERY COURT DESCRIBED.

(By Telegraph.—Press Association.)

CHRISTCHURCH, Wednesday.

The attendance at the Exhibition this morning was very limited, but increased in the afternoon. The show and other attractions helped to reuuee the number of visitors. The Premier and Lady Ward and tne Hons. J. McGowan and Geo. Fovvlds visited the South Australian court to-day, and were received by Commissioner Scott, who presented Lady Ward with a specimen of a small tortoise found in Northern Territory.

The machinery hall in the Exhibition has the advantage of being located where it cannot be missed, for it abuts on the northernmost extremity of the main corridor, and, as everyone passes along this during the diurnal inspection, the machinery has necessarily a large audience. The whirr and buzz of the active mechanism attracts lac attention of the curious, but otherwise uninterested spectator, though there is usually a large gathering of persons engaged in industrial pursuits who are eager to discover anything new in the way of mechanism.

The machinery exhibit comprises four great classes—gas engines, electrical machinery, motor cars, and machine tools. Steam engines are few and far between, and the large quantities of manufactured products that are displayed in the hall are scarcely within the province of the section. Besides these classes, there are, of course, many exhibits far too numerous to bring WAi-uin any general classification.

The railway section, which is located within the hall, is so large and so distinct that it can well be regarded as external to the general display. Among the prime movers in use, gas engines easily take lhe lead. The internal combustion engines, however, are übiquitous. They cough and spin everywhere, and distribute a tithe of their power, in more or less profitable directions generally, through the medium of the equally übiquitous dynamo. Next, but a very bad second, among the generators of power are the quaint hot air engines.. These strange contrivances, bulky lor their power but simple in principle, carry on their staggering gait untir.ngly, and attract endless attention by their peculiar appearance.

The electrical machinery is wider in its distribution than anything else in the machinery hall. Every other eug.ue drives a dynamo, and what the other gas engines do not drive are puued round by electric motors. Fans and there make cooling draughts, and a whole room has been beautifully lilted up as a sort of electrical parlour with fans and lamps as well as non-working fittings, and is supplied by a special lighting set outside.

The principal exhibits of electrical machinery are the two t,ets used in connection with the lighting of the Exhibition, comprising engines and dynamos Aggregating about 2JO horse power. Both of these sets are intended for use at Timaru, which is shortly to be lit with electricity by the municipality.

The motor ears make a splendid .-.how. They are responsible for much of the colour and lightness of the hall, for they occupy the central part, and their bright paint and flanking iuws of shiny motor cycles catch the eye at once. There are three tine stands of cars, ranging from small runabouts to heavy touring cars. They are all of the best quality, for the idea is not to show cheap machines but good ones. Many of them have side doors opened to show their polished interiors. There is great variety in the motor cycles shown, and some of them approach very nearly to gracefulness.

The machine tools shown are of a great variety, and are intensely prosaic. Their uncompromising black finish announces their usefulness, and their build announces their purposes. The sturdier of them work metal, and the lighter work wood. There are lathes, band saws, drills, planing machines, and riveters, and smaller fry innumerable, but generally speaking they are ugly and much too inscrutable for the average spectator. The miscellaneous class is too big to describe. Separators, telephone insulators, bricks, all sorts of odds and ends are there.

Some complete refrigerating plants are of considerable interest, and these are generally in going order, and another exhibit that, though late in ite completion, will have a coterie of admirers, is a complete producer gas plant, working in conjunction with a big gas engine. The New Zealand railway section, while possessing vast importance as not only showing what can now be done in the colony in the matter of supplying our own railway plant, but also giving a pointer as to what may still be achieved in the near future, is one which cannot be popularly described. The eye of the layman, viewing the splendid exhibits, may take in in a genera] way the excellence of the work displayed, but only the expert can fully appreciate. To describe it for the edification of the latter would require columns of type, and the former could not be enlightened by any mere description. It is sufficient to say that the exhibits show a development in our engineering skill -and appliances which are quite in keeping with the progressiveness of the industrial operations of the colony. In other respects the engines and other rolling stock and railway appliances placed on view demonstrate that, if New Zealand is not yet quite independent of other countries in the matter of manufacturing all the gear it requires for its working railways, it is within measurable distance of being so, for at the present time the larger class of locomotives are being manufactured in the colonial railway workshops with signal success, as is shown by the exhibits. One locomotive shown is of the Deglehn four-cylinder balanced compound type, not unlike the familiar Baldwin of the present expresses. The engine and tender measure 60 feet from end to end, and the locomotive is a veritable monster weighing 72 tons in. working trim. The whole structure of the engine is fine in the extreme.

There is among the exhibits a display of raw materials in various stages of conversion into finished parts, and there are exhibits of forgings and cast-

ings of iron and brass of great excellence. There are many highly interesting features connected with the display in the railway section.