Marlborough Foundry creates town seals for the Kenneth F. Burns Memorial Bridge

Marlborough Foundry has created the town seals for Shrewsbury and the Worcester city on the both sides of the Kenneth F. Burns Memorial Bridge over Lake Quinsigamond. The town seals display the emblems of two communities that are divided by a sprawling body of water but connected by a steel-girder bridge.

“First we had to make a pattern, make some tooling to create the mould,” said Karl Nye, the foundry’s vice president of marketing. “And then we had to create the mould in the sand and then fill it up with molten aluminium," he added.

The Marlborough foundry, which is a 63-year-old, family-owned custom precision aluminium casting company, finished the work in about a month. Mr. Nye estimated that about half of the 21 employees in the firm had contributed towards the making of the seals.

They have constructed the seals out of “military grade aluminium," and the seals measure 7 feet in diameter and weigh roughly a half-a-ton each, “or to be more precise, 1,100 pounds for the Shrewsbury town emblem and 950 for the Worcester city emblem, “Mr Nye said.

The difference in weight between the two seals was because of the design intricacies, he added.

According to Mr. Nye, the seals should last a couple hundred years despite the wet New England weather.

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The foundry is known for its clock castings displayed in different town centres, Mr. Nye said these are the first such huge town/city seals that the company has moulded and it was a fun project different from their usual work.

“The stuff that we do is typically for machines for industry,” he said. “So this was kind of a fun project.”