COKE OVENS - Part 7

The casting campaign finished up late last week.  I ended up casting about 80 doors - 65 for the ovens, six for the spare door storage area, and the rest had significant defects and where unusable.

They go on and on and on.....

I also kitbashed a Walthers' Glacial Gravel kit for the coke crushing, screening, and loading building.  I basically streamlined the structure to sit over two tracks, not building about half of the structure.  This sounds easier than it is - the kit has the intersecting rooflines molded into the kit walls, with the area under the roof profile, smooth plastic.  I had to cut out these sections and carefully splice in pieces from the unused walls at the molded metal siding seams.  I also found a way to retain the small loading bins from my previous coke works, themselves from a Walthers' New River Mining kit, but modified with stairs,....etc...

Ignore the too blue sky and crappy back drop - soon to be changed and the rest of the coal/coke yard scenicd

I've seen some very interesting quench towers but don't really have enough information, and maybe space too, to build them, so I once again turned to the Thomas Coke drawings and photos for inspiration.  The Thomas Coke quench tower is a pretty interesting structure in it's own right with an external steel framework and corrugated panels on the inside.  I was on a roll with this structure, building most of it while watching True Blood and then Breaking Bad this evening, but alas, ran out of 5/32" I-beams.  It's a basic structure - 3/16 vertical H-Columns, 5/32 horizontal I-girders, .040x.040 diagonal bracing, and .125 strip reinforcing on the insides.  The "foundation" was .080x.250 strip.

Needs more I-beams and some plumbing