Thursday, May 13, 2010

A-FURNACE PART 28






Uptake nightmare - 
I knew very early on in the project that the uptakes on A-Furnace were going to be very challenging.  Besides all the odd angle pipe joints and diameter transitions, the builders of Bethlehem Lehigh A-Furnace made my job even harder by using some kind of weird looking piping at the two junctions of the uptakes on each side.  On top of the odd angles on this junction, to make things just a bit harder, the pipe transitions from 3/4" to 7/8" .  For what its worth, the plan I came up with was to do the best I could with little chunks of piping and then use liberal amounts of body filler and lots of sanding to achieve the final product.   To help me, I built some some jigs for my lathe -  a spindle sander with 3/4" 7/8" and 1" diameters to shape the pipe, and an angle jig for sanding precise angles on the pipes.   I'm about half way through and there is still a lot of sanding and filling to go, but it's starting to look like I want.  

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