NEW MILK CANS FOR OLD.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 256, 26 September 1940, Page 8

NEW MILK CANS FOR OLD.

SOME FROM SCRAP-HEAP

Thousands of old milk cans, some extremely dilapidated, have been brought up to a state of newness £>y reconditioning, in Palmerston North, in the past few months, and there is sufficient work in view to keep the operators busy until about Christmas. Steel lias been in very, short supply for the making of cans, and when the. sudden swing-over came from butter to cheese supply, the demand, for milk cans was so great that particular efforts had to bo made to cope with it, and industry in this city has played its part. Supplying cheese factories was in other days more popular than it has been in the past few years, hut the extension of transport, the inception of electric power and home . separation saw many milk cans discarded, the smaller cream cans taking their place: When many farmers changed over to supplying cheese factories the countryside was scoured for milk calls in good order. It was soon seen that there was a decidedly insufficient numbei, and the peak demand for reconditioning then soon arrived. Cans which had held grass-seed (to prevent rats and mice trom getting at it), which had been employed for holding meal of various kinds, as receptacles for horse feed, for fowl wheat and a dozen other needs about the farms, -were brought to light. Some evidently came from scrap-heaps. Where the steel was not eaten through by rust, the task of making a. new covering of tin could be undertaken in the normal course of the work, and there has been a steady flow of milk cans to and from Palmerston ’North from as far afield as Taranaki, Napier and Hastings and all the intermediate districts for treatment.

In one process employed the cans are entirely dismantled . after they have been: cheeked on arrival, the handles, bottoms, and hoops being taken off by heat. The dents are removed and the cans go into a “pickling” process; immersion in an acid which removes all the greasy and rusty deposits, while also penetrating the pores of the metal to make it thoroughly clean. This pickling acid is removed and the cans next pass through a bath containing a special fluid which acts in a similar way to hydro-chloric acid. From here the cans go through the tinning bath, a tank of molten tin, heated bv wood firing, and wbe.n the tin has to the steel components they are passed through a polishing bath, and the cans are reassembled, any repairs' being finally carried, out to fully restore them.