The old section of the building is the section I like the most. Many people around Brantford know the building as the old Coca Cola building. Coca Cola used to bottle pop at this location. The old syrup tank still exists as do the drains in the floor where the bottles were washed out.
From what we can tell the old section was built around 1920. The exposed beams in the loft have Carnegie USA rolled into them. The structure is both bolted and rivoted, this would have been the time when bolts where getting more cost effective and starting to replace rivoted construction. I believe Carnegie sold his steel mills in the early 1900 or late 1800, I don't know how long they continued to roll Carnegie into the beams.
The clips for the wood ceiling beams are rivoted to the steel beam and bolted to the wood beam. I suspect that this is one of the evolutionary steps to what we know now as a pre-fabricated building.
The east and the north sides of our building were added on to in the 1970's. The picture below is the east door into the building. This door goes into our sand blast area and the employee’s regularly use it to enter the building. During the summer I had the locks changed on the building. I would say I have the locks changed every two years. The lock smith comes in, fixes the door and locks and re-keys them for me. A few years ago we had a very large employee not able to get his key to work; we had forgotten to give him a new key, as he had been off for a few days. In apparent frustration that the lock no longer seemed to work he decided to pull on the door to get it open, he pulled hard enough that he actually pulled the door off the hinges. Although the hinges where rusty we never expected someone to be large and strong enough to accomplish tearing off the door. Since then we have reinforced the door and every time I have had the locks changed I put the following sign up.
Not knowing the purpose of the sign, it scares a lot of customers and venders. I have two thoughts on this, if you know us well enough to enter the side door un-announced then you likely know our sense of hummer, and if it scares the crap out of you, then you probably should be entering through the front door. This is an industrial establishment, even though we do everything possible to keep it a safe environment I would not recommend to anyone to just wonder around an unfamiliar building.
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