In the center of the photo above are holding furnaces for the melted iron. On the left of the one in the foreground is a “bull.” Metal is poured into it to be taken to where it will go into the molds.

Pouring aluminum into a mold. Items at the lower right are "sword feet" for fly shuttle looms.

These workers are putting “cores” into a mold. They are used where holes or slots are required in the casting. The part being cast appears to be a loom side

Pouring into a mold.

After the castings cool and harden, they go through a process where steel shot is blasted at them to clean the sand off of them. They hang on hooks as they go through, and come out as clean, rough castings. The castings on the left were made for Diehl. They made the motors for the looms. Drapers made the castings for the motors and sent them to Diehl. They’d come back as finished motors. The items at the lower right appear to be the bases the motors would sit on.

John Hogarth, who appears to be looking at a spectrograph in the foundry.

Pattern makers working on a pattern for a tape motion bracket for the shuttleless loom.

Computer controlled machine. The industrial engineering department would make up tapes that would tell the machine what to do.

Worker is making a loom harness cam.

Draper Corporation – Hopedale, Massachusetts 

Page 1

The pictures on this page were saved by Draper employee Bob Anderson of Upton. Bob was one of the last workers at the plant before it closed in 1980. He saw that the Rockwell people in charge at that time were throwing out many old Draper items including a huge number of photos. He rescued many of them and passed them on me  I’m going to scan them and put them on this site, doing about 15 per page. Thanks to Bob for saving them and to Tom Bair of the Upton History Museum for putting me in touch with Bob. The captions are from Bob’s comments on the pictures.

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