Brearley left Firths after a dispute over the patents and was offered a position at Brown Bayley, where he was appointed works manager and then became a director.
The ladles were manoeuvred by overhead crane into the casting bays where they were poured over several ceramic runner systems, which each fed six preheated one-ton ingot moulds.
As of 2016, a fully restored original example of one of the steam lorries carrying the Brown Bayley livery can be found at the Riverside Museum in Glasgow.
Impurities were gouged out with chisels using pneumatic “chipping hammers” or by manually operated swing frame grinding.
These hot saws were capable of slicing through 4-inch (100 mm) bar in seconds with showers of sparks and the screaming metal emitting a noise of 110 decibels.
Again the entry chute to the machine was a lidded box built to contain the flailing bent bars which emitted a very loud rattling noise.
In one hot summer the floor plates expanded, the expansion could not go anywhere and two plates buckled upwards like flagstones directing the hot metal into the air – within milliseconds there was no one on the mill floor as the metal reared up towards the roof and collapsed in a writhing heap as the mill rollers continued to spew out the rest of the bar.