PIPE FOUNDRY Part-3

Baghouses -  As we rush to build the structures for this module we are working on a few fronts.   We are depicting two baghouses on our module, similar to the prototype practice.  

Before I go on, a brief description of these structures -  Basically a bag house is a giant shop vac.  In the glory years, before the EPA, foundries like ours would basically just have a stack and all the particulate residue from the foundry process would go right up the stack and into the air and then where ever.  As the government gradually began to address this pollution, more and more particulates had to be removed before anything went up any stacks.  There are a number of methods of doing this - water sprays , precipitators,...etc.   Baghouses basically contain a series of cloth bags just like a shop vac to filter out these particulates.  There is some sort of mechanism to shake or clean the bags out, with the dust falling into hoppers and from there either dumped into railcars, trucks, or on the ground.  With our large baghouse there is a piping system to move this dust into a storage silo and thence into trucks.  (I have no idea what they do with it after that)   

On the module we will have two baghouses - the cupola baghouse and the ductile baghouse.   The cupola baghouse is the largest, receiving waste gases directly (after some cooling)  from the stacks of the cupolas.  It has 27 hoppers and is approximately 180' long.    The ductile baghouse is for primarily the pipe casting areas that we are not modeling, but also receive some dirty air from inside the cupola building.  We are modeling it with 12 hoppers.   

In modeling these structures the most complicated piece are the hoppers as it is an elongated pyramid shape.  Building these individually out of styrene would be very time consuming.  Casting them out of resin would be very expensive.  We chose to use MDF.  If was fairly easy to cut the elongated sides in a table saw and then the short side in a miter saw.  You can see the finished sections, glued up on a 3/4" piece of MDF.   My only concern with this method is that these pieces are fairly heavy and might deform the small supports.  If I notice this happening I might have to find a way to conceal some steel struts.