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25 X 155/RG GAU-7A CTA round

This building contains the production line and presses for the forward & aft propellant charges. It appears that this line was added later to what was originally a generic work building. You can see the front half of the building is comprised of huge concrete "cubicles" whose walls go up through the roof. The ceiling & back walls were flimsy so that if you blew up, the blast went up & backwards while not spreading to the station next to you. Many of the buildings were made this way. The plywood awning enclosure was added to house the conveyor that moved the pressed & dried charges to the back of the building for further assembly. The exhaust stacks were added and those workrooms were turned into drying rooms to oven-cure the charges. You can see at the far end of the building that the roof of two of the "cubicles" have been enclosed. Those are where the elevators to the press hoppers are.
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This is the forward charge press. It's very difficult to get good pictures of these machines, as they take up every last inch of the stall where they were mounted.
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This is the elevator that delivered the powder to the hopper at the top of the press (the reason for the extended roof in the outside pic of the building). Note the conveyor on the right that moved the finished charge down the line.
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Control area for the charge press. You can see the machine through the glass a little bit. That glass is about 4 inches thick. Out of frame to the left is the control for the aft charge with a window looking through to a similar press room. Out of frame to my right is the conveyor moving all the finished charges down the line.
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I have gobs more pics & info that need resizing and/or scanning. I'm over there every couple of days walking my dogs, so I can get shots anytime. Perhaps one of these days I'll scan some of the documentation I have, but it would take a while.
 
Fascinating and thanks again, its great to see these pictures.
Scans of the documentation would be fantastic when you have time.
It amazes me they left all this behind.
Dave.
 
crunchysuperman said:
I have gobs more pics & info that need resizing and/or scanning. I'm over there every couple of days walking my dogs, so I can get shots anytime. Perhaps one of these days I'll scan some of the documentation I have, but it would take a while.
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Welcome to bocn crunchysuperman, and thankyou for posting some very interesting photographs. To echo what Dave has already said, amazing that so much stuff was left behind!!
Will look forward to seeing further pictures as and when you post them

kind regards Kev
 
Great images of a historical site actually.
If any documentation on the ammunition becomes available it would be great to have it in the download section.
 
Here are a couple of aerial shots from Sept. 1970 that we found. These pre-date the phase IV 25mm production by a year or two. The charge press building had not yet been modified and that particular firing range hadn't been built yet (there were a couple more present for other projects, however)

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Also, here's a pdf I didn't scan in, but found elsewhere online while doing some research. Looks to be the final report to the Air Force after the project was terminated.
http://crunchysuperman.freeservers.com/brunswick/GAU-7A Brunswick.pdf
 
SG500 said:
It amazes me they left all this behind.
Dave.
Click to expand...

When the project was cancelled, it was the beginning of the end for this Brunswick plant. Although they still did some work over there, the buildings assigned to the 25mm project were not reused for any other purpose. That, along with the fact that it was all federally funded and the sheer mass of these machines, I suppose it just wasn't worth while to bother removing them. We will eventually dig it all out for scrap, as we have for much of it thus far. I could kick myself for not documenting the site further, as much has been removed already. The building where the case felting was done had some particularly interesting equipment in it, and in very good condition as the building didn't leak. Sadly, I never took a single pic. :(
 
Crunchy, did you have a chance to check on the target area of the shooting range for remaining projectiles? these areas are usually very interesting.
 
Nothing lying around that I could see. Keep in mind that there's 40 years of growth on that hillside now. We'd talked about going in there with a dozer one of these days to see what emerges, but if they used to have a downrange building called "projectile recovery", they may have collected every shot for analysis anyway.
 
More pics.

Here's an outside shot of the test fire building.
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Close up of that steel plate. Looks like they had a little accident there. :)
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As the charges came out of the presses, employees would apparently load them into those racks you see in that pile. They hang from the overhead conveyor that you can barely see in this shot. That tank would elevate and dip each rack before proceeding through the drying ovens.
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More of the conveyor. You can see the partially open shutter door coming out of the last oven room.
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Here's a closer shot of one of the press controls.
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Better shot of that dip tank entrance to the ovens.
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Inside one of the drying rooms. Hard to get a good perspective as the rooms are so small and so full.
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Here's something neat - magazine storage bunker. There are 7 of these (were 8) buildings dug down into the surrounding hillsides for ordinance storage.
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What's left of a locker room coming out of one of the shower rooms.
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Boiler for the showers. Of particular note is the thick layer of asbestos insulation on those storage tanks. :)
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This shot gives a better view of the construction of most of the workstations. As you can see, the back walls were just simple sheets of either plastic, fiberglass or just 1/4" plywood. The roof was just one sheet of tin and minimal bracing. That way, when you screw up and get splattered all over the walls, the explosion doesn't spread to guy beside you.
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One bit of interesting info. The place was originally built with no fire suppression system. The big water tank, pump house & all the sprinkler lines for the whole complex were not installed until 1970. I even found the original quote from the sprinker company for the installation.
 
This is where all the felting operations took place, and the one building I wish I had documented before we gutted it for scrap. The combustible cases were made from a slurry of craft paper and nitrocellulose pulp that was coated onto forms, vacuumed, cured, resin dipped & then cured again - essentially making an explosive cardboard. There were enormous stainless steel tanks, pumps, slurry mixers, various mechanisms and all the controls for all of it when we got here. All this required an insane amount of water. There's a 200,000 gallon tank that fed this building alone. Between that and the 300,000 fire suppression tank, there were five well houses with 20hp submersible pumps, and an additional five wells drilled, but never used. There was a time when the small surrounding town got their water from Brunswick. The large ditch you see in the ground in front of the building was dug out as the expansion pond for drainage from manufacturing operations.
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This is just a shot of some of the lower buildings as seen from the hill with the charge press building. The two on the left were mostly receiving warehouses. I don't know the original purposes for the ones on the right, but they were being used in the 80's for various aircraft & mobile shelter parts plating. Some F117 work was done in that second building from the right in the early 80's. You can see the office building up on the left.

You can also see a little bit of the buildings up the hill back in the trees. That's where the really nasty stuff took place with the CS gas production.
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Thanks for the info on the case manufacturer. Be careful about the asbestos, it still kills thousands of people in the UK each year........who were exposed to it over 30 years ago, very nasty stuff (I've spent the last 24 years making sure people manage or remove it correctly).
Dave.
 
Crunchysuperman,

What state is this former factory located in? When I saw the conveyor through the drying ovens, it reminded me of the washing rooms and drying rooms for a powder coating operation. You might be able to sell that equipment to people doing powder coating or installing equipment, or rent that building out to someone doing that type of thing. There are companies that sell used manufacturing equipment and automation like that.
 
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