Montreal Olympic Stadium

McBurney Sales was involved in the supply of hydraulic equipment used to assemble the olympic stadium in Montreal. This was a great big mechano set. Reinforced concrete blocks were manufactured in a plant just outside Montreal and using a system designed in Europe by a company called Dywidag, they were put together as the structure we now refer to as the Olympic Stadium.

Anyone old enough to read a paper at the time will remember the problems Montreal had building that structure. Too many people doing too little work. Look at all the cranes. When I was there to put out a small fire involving our equipment, I saw two cranes lift something in 4 hours. Larry Carter and I were involved in one of the lifts to the top of the structure where we examined the structure from the top. Why were we there. Simple. Our customer was being charged over $400.00 for a simple modification he required to protect his 600 ton cylinders from blowing apart if the operator made a mistake. We went to Montreal, looked at the job and for $75.00 per pump, we modified them to protect the system. Did I mention that they had 50 pumps and most of them still required required the modification.

	More of the infrastructure that is held together by the anchoring system you see below.
This is the Dywidag Anchoring System that holds the Olympic Stadium together. They are rein-forced concrete blocks and the system calls for a large hydraulic cylinder to draw them together and lock them in place.

This is how we dressed in the mid 70's. Funny, I can hardly remember having that much hair. Another little tidbit about this project. The pictures you are looking at were taken by a old 35mm camera that I was given by may parents as a tean. They were over 25 years old and faded when I scanned them into my computer for this layout. The pictures from the U of T were taken by a polaroid and did not fade as nearly as much. Its funny. When these shots were taken, we didn't think we would have to learn about computers. They existed, only in large company's with controlled environments and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now we can't live without them.