Clinker Shed

The clinker shed at Kandos Cement Works is a long steel-clad building that held the kiln output between the kiln cooler and the cement mills. The shed has a high pitched roof in corrugated iron, supported on lattice steel trusses, with a clerestory running the length of the apex. The floor is open concrete, with a track and chute system overhead for moving clinker through the building. Mounds and ridges of unswept clinker remain in places along the floor, a dark grey rubble that catches the dust-filtered light coming through the roof. Steel doors at both ends are partly open. The shed runs long enough that the far end disappears into shadow.

Clinker is the lumpy intermediate product that emerges from a rotary kiln at around 1,400 degrees Celsius and is cooled before it goes to the cement mills for grinding. Storage sheds like this one buffered the kilns from the mills, so that the kilns could run continuously while the mills worked through the output at their own pace. The Kandos plant ran two production circuits from 1916 onwards, expanded in stages, and produced cement for major Sydney construction projects, including the Sydney Harbour Bridge between 1928 and 1932. The kilns shut down with the rest of the plant in September 2011. The clinker still on the floor of the shed has not been touched since.