Gin gang
structure built to enclose a horse mill
A gin gang, wheelhouse, roundhouse or horse-engine house is a structure built to enclose a horse engine, usually circular but sometimes square or octagonal, attached to a threshing barn. Most were built in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The threshing barn held a small threshing machine which was connected to the gin gang via wooden gears, drive shafts and drive belt, and was powered by a horse which walked round and round inside the gin gang.
Operation and structure
The gin (short for "engine") was the motive power driving a small threshing machine, and the horse did the gang, or going. The gin gang was always attached to the main threshing barn, where the gin was situated. It was almost always of one storey and it could be circular, polygonal or square. There was a hole for a drive−shaft or drive−belt, linking it with the threshing barn. The gin was connected by cogs to a vertical spindle. The spindle was connected to a horizontal arrangement including a shaft attached to a horse, which turned the spindle and powered the machine by ganging or walking round and round the cogs and vertical spindle inside the walls of the gin gang. This arrangement was necessary in locations where there was no power for a water wheel, hence in Wales and Ireland there is evidence of fewer gin gangs.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gin gang” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.