Days 46-52: Arriving at the Big City of Springfield, MA

Well, another nine miles down the road and I've finally arrived at Springfield, Massachusetts, one of the biggest cities in the state.

Wilbraham to Springfield, MA

For part of the journey, US-20 hitches a ride on I-291 for a few miles. Since I couldn't stop on the interstate, I had to get off at the nine-mile mark, where there's a gas station and quick-stop called Racing Mart, at 475 St. James Avenue. (I don't plan to stay long here, though, since it got kind of bad reviews for customer service.)

Along the way, there are some items of interest. The Wikipedia article for Springfield points to a number of interesting features of the city. Below are a few:

Founded in 1636 as the first Springfield in the New World, during the American Revolution, George Washington designated it as the site of the Springfield Armory for its central location, subsequently the site of Shays' Rebellion. The city would also play a pivotal role in the Civil War, as a stop on the Underground Railroad and home of abolitionist John Brown, widely known for his raid on Harpers Ferry,[15] and for the Armory's manufacture of the famed 'Springfield rifles' used ubiquitously by Union troops. 

The article has a great deal of information about the city, including a long and wide-ranging list of prominent citizens who hailed from Springfield, among them the aforementioned John Brown, as well as Timothy Leary, Dr. Suess, the artist Whistler, and Kurt Russell.

I'm always curious about what manufacturing goes on in the towns and cities I pass through, and it seems there is always a little factory or plant (or sometimes a big factory) along US-20 that I can investigate. One place I happened to notice on my latest trek is Norpin Manufacturing, at 2342 Boston Road in Wilbraham. It's a family-owned factory, in business since 1956, specializing in making what are called deep drawn enclosures. This was something I'd never heard of so I was intrigued. Well, if you've ever seen an object made of any kind of metal that is shaped in such a way that it would enclose something, you're looking at a deep drawn enclosure. They call it deep drawn because a metal sheet is drawn or pushed through a mold or die, usually by way of a punch, making it deeper than it is wide. Below is a diagram of this process.

Taken from Mech4Study

As you can imagine, all kinds of products that we use every day are made in this way. I thought immediately of napkin holders of the kind diners have on their tables. In fact, they have some like that in the Fabulous 50s Diner!

Fabulous 50's Diner Inside

But other types of metal containers, such as the cylinders used for automotive oil filters, or beverage cans, or electrical switch receptacles, are also made with this process. Norpin Manufacturing makes a variety of small enclosures, as they describe on their website. But they also produced this cute video, "A Day in the Life of a Deep Drawn Enclosure," which you can see here: Norpin. It's fun to watch with its lively music and speeded-up action. No explanations, but you can figure it out. I wanted to know what enclosure's "life" was being documented in the film, so I wrote them and they kindly replied that they were making a transformer housing for an amplifier. I watched another video from a German company (Geertz) that also makes deep-drawn enclosures; it was much more polished, with jazzier music and sexier visuals, but not nearly as much fun.

Arriving at Springfield, US-20 takes a sharp right turn away from the Boston Road and passes by a small lake known as Five-Mile Pond. Below is a satellite photo of the feature.

This body of water, according to the city's Open Space Plan, is 39 acres in surface area, has a maximum depth of 36 feet, and averages 15 feet in depth. Its origin is what's called a glacial kettle hole. The National Park Service has a little discussion about that geological feature. Below is a diagram of the process nature goes through to make a glacial kettle hole.

Taken from Glacial Massachusetts 

Well, I guess that's enough sight-seeing for this segment of my trip. I've arrived at my destination, the Racing Mart, where I'll take a break. Next week I'll be just a little further down the road.