B-FURNACE Part 12

Over the past year I've had a few near crashes with the one unsecured stove and the taller unsecured smokestack.  After a long hot day at work it was a simple enough task to focus on - secure these two remaining loose pieces and start adding walkways to tie it all together.  Figuring out the walkways from a half dozen photos wasn't two bad.  To facilitate laying out circular walks I made an aid shown in the one picture.    The walks are made from .030 sheet styrene with .040x.040 strip along the perimeter.  The supports are mostly .040x.040 with some assort workbench scrap structural pieces to add bracing to the smokestack.  (If you remember from long ago, the smokestack is pretty heavy as it has a hardwood core).    

After years of meaning to get to it, I finally got around to picking up the Making Shaping and Treating of Steel.   It was up in the air between the 6th and 7th editions, but I settled on the 6th, published in 1951 as it fits well within the time period I am modeling and also, it tends to be a little cheaper as I think they made the 7th edition onward in a larger format.   The price was right - through Amazon - $11 for the book and $4 shipping.  I came in less than a week from an used book dealer that sells through them.  The condition was very good and the pull outs are all intact and overall the book appears to have seen little use.   It brought back a lot of memories - in college I would spend hours in the Rutgers Library of Science and Medicine perusing a reference copy of a latter addition of this very book.  In fact, I can probably trace my interest in industrial archeology and the steel industry and steel modeling back to late nights at that library, and two books - the US Steel bible I've been talking about, and another large book just entitled Industrial Archeology or something like that.  The second book had a fair sized section on the Sloss Furnaces that caught my interest.   Within a few months I ditched my future as an electrical engineer and switched my major to history and my minor to archeology.  Fortunately for me, the outstanding Rutger's History Department had many professors involved in the study of the History of Technology and through the Archeology Department I was able to connect with many of the leading industrial archeologists of the day, some that were the founders of the speciality.