Hot Shot Furnace

Hot Shot Furnace. . The hot shot furnace was built in 1858 to heat cannonballs for the 32 pounder cannons originally planned for but never installed at Fort Knox. These cannons would have fired heated cannonballs at enemy ships in order to set the ships on fire., The Rodman cannons finally installed in Battery B fired much bigger cannonballs. The size, rather than the temperature of these cannonballs, could inflict damage on the fireproof "ironclads" that had largely replaced wooden-hulled ships by the 1860's., Even though this hot shot furnace was never "fired up," it stands as an important feature of early cannon technology., To use the furnace, the soldiers would have first built a fire (probably coal) in the fire box in the side of the furnace. When the fire had heated the interior, soldiers would have loaded cold cannonballs into one end of the furnace. The cannonballs would have rolled down sets of sloping rails and stopped at the furnace's other end. The first balls loaded would have been directly over the firebox where they remained for approximately 30 minutes until they were red hot. Once hot, the balls would have been removed, the next set of balls would roll into place, and the process would start again., Soldiers would have removed the hot balls from the furnace with iron forks, scraped the balls carefully with a rasp to remove scale, and then, using iron and wood ladles, carried the balls to the nearby cannons.