Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/516

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488

��Popular Science Monthly

���In order to reduce his unloading time and also to run coal into cellars as awkwardly placed as this, a coal- merchant had a special truck body designed like that shown here

Small Motor Trucks Deliver Coal Cheaply

SAVING time by means of a dump- ing body elevated by power from its own motor and skids laid over the sidewalk, the small two-ton truck shown in the accompanying illustration deliv- ered an average on thirty tons per day for a period of several months and in

��doing so covered between fifty and sixty miles daily. At two tons per load this means fifteen trips per ten- hour day with an average length of trip of three to four miles.

In large cities, where streets are well paved, the coal de- livered in large quantities and the hauls more than five miles, five- to ten-ton trucks have proved very suc- cessful. But for country and suburban work, where the roads are poorer, the coal de- livered in five-ton loads or less and the hauls less than five miles, trucks of tv*o-tons capacity or there- abouts have proved best.

For work in residence sections where the streets are soft, small-capacity trucks can maneuver more quickly than larger ones, run less chance of getting mired, and because of their greater speed, can often deliver a greater tonnage.

��A Man-Power Reel for Hauling in a Long Seine

AN ingenious device for hauling in a long seine has been introduced by a fisherman who operates on a large scale in Mississippi. The seine he uSes is over a mile in iength, and it would require a large crew to haul it in. The contrivance he has invented consists of two wheels about eight feet in diameter, mounted on the ends of an axle, thus forming a huge reel. This is mounted on a scow so that it can re- revolve. The seine is wound up on the big reel.

When it is to be laid, the rowed out to the desired spot,

���The fisherman winds up his mile-long seine on a big windlass which a small crew can operate by hand in a moderate-sized boat

��scow IS

the end of the seine is fastened to a stake, which is driven to the bottom, and the seine is paid out from the reel as the scow is rowed away from the stake. A man at each wheel tends the seine to keep it from tangling. To haul it in, two of the crew tread up the spokes of the wheels so that the reel revolves and slowly rolls

��up the seine on the axle, the scow mean- while being backed over the course of the laid seine. Negro labor is cheap in the far South, so that this device has proved both economical and efiicient.

��T'

��^HIRTY-FOUR dollars a minute is the cost of maintaining New York's police force of nearly eleven thousand men.

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