Friday, January 30, 2009

Stoves for A-Furnace


I've been working on the A Furnace Stoves a bit as you can see.  The stove structures are built from Rix water tank kits.   For those of you unfamiliar with these kits, they come in three sizes - 25' 40' and 60' and in two different styles of tops - peaked and flat.  The kits are very easy to build, as are most Rix items.  The tanks are built in 8 or 9 scale foot lifts, with each lift comprising of 6 pieces.  The overlap between pieces are at rivet seams so the look is excellent.  Additionally, the overlapping sections have a lip that extends downward that aligns each section on top of the previous one.   One thing that you do need to know is that there are three different sizes of panels (heights) and within each size there are anywhere from two to three styles of panels.   A guide to Rix sections:

Smallest in Height - three rivet lines on vertical seams - 3 versions - no horizontal rivets, horizontal rivets on one edge, horizontal rivets on both edges

Medium Height - two rivet lines on vertical seams - 2 versions - with or without horizontal rivets

Large Height - four rivet lines - 2 versions - with or without horizontal rivets

The first stove I built I just grabbed sections until I hit the prototype height (tallest stove in photo)   If I had to do it again I would have put more thought into it as some of the sections don't come in the smaller packages so I end up buying just the 60' to match the existing pattern.  Also, I end up with extras.  As I said in an early post, the tank sections scale out at 24' diameter as opposed to the actual McClure Stove prototype diameter of about 22' - a sacrifice of scale for the awesome rivet detail on the Rix tanks.    While we are on the subject of these tanks - I also plan to use them for the twin precipitator units located behind A furnace and for the stoves on B furnace.  

I'm going to work on the tapered tops for the stoves this weekend.  I recently purchased Jeff Borne's DVD - Superdetailing a Walthers Blast Furnace Part 2     It turned out to be much better than I ever expected - he's an awesome modeler and the DVD changed my thinking on my approach to a few things.  The reason I started with Part 2 is that he has a section on Three-Pass Stoves.   For the stove tops I originally was going to use either individual wood turnings or resin castings of a wood master.  Borne used vac-formed Plastruct conical sections to good effect.   Not wanting to wait for a Plastruct order, I'm going to create a master, along with a master for the two-pass stove tops on blast furnace B and maybe a few other small parts and vac form these parts from styrene.  Hopefully there will be more of this on the next post.

I started to install my new NCE DCC system this week - for whatever reason after switching the Dynamis system out for the NCE I got a short.  I couldn't find anything obvious so I ended up disconnecting all my feeds and slowly putting them back on.  I still haven't found the short, but have traced it back to the inner loop rail.  The system is pretty nifty for what I have up and running.  Finally we can both control trains at one time since we now have two cabs, and hopefully more to come.  Of course Jimmy and myself got a bit immature (he's entitled, I'm 42) and started chasing each other back and forth until we slammed two $130 engines into each other pretty hard.  We also got a kick out of stealing control from each other of their engines.  Hopefully we will grow up a bit once it's all up and running.  

We also averted a near divorce with the wife earlier this week - just prior to last weekend's four figure spending spree at the Springfield train show I received a call from Bruce, the proprietor of Sattlers - one of the few remaining train stores in the area - that an order had come in - two Walther's Brownhoist cranes and the Plastruct Sintering Plant kit.   I pre-warned the boss(wife) that I would have to pick up and PAY for these items the monday following our jaunt to Mass.   However, by the time I arrived at Sattlers on monday, my other order for the Walther's Electric Furnace kit that was due in February or March was there.   After some shameful un-manly groveling via cell phone and Bruce's price reduction (Fall of Siapan Sale) credit was secured and the kit was mine.  

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