Friday, December 10, 2010

R&H CHEMICAL PLANT Part 4






I promise there will be some steel related posts soon, but in the meantime I will continue with the chemical plant.   In one of the photos you will see a pile of Detail Kits for the Walthers Ethanol Plant - These make a total of nine of these kits that I have purchased.  As I mentioned before, they have a mix of detail items, but I am specifically after the stair towers, which there are two.   They are nice looking and from a cost standpoint probably work out to be just cheaper than scratchbuilding, but they are of course, much faster to build.   This should be the bulk of what I need them for right now, but in the future I probably will pick up one or two as I see them.  
In a continued effort to detail the main production building, and also to stick to the prototype, I've built a materials elevator for one side and a twin fractioning tower unit for the other - see photos.  The elevator was built from a Kibri leftover and some Plastruct parts.  The fractioning towers are from the Vollmer Refinery Kit - left over from my Dad's layout.  This kit was always one of my favorites as a kid.   I saved the model but over the years I've broken it apart - some of the pieces are featured in the coke works by-products plant, as well as in the chemical plant.  The kit railings are severely out of scale so I've replaced these with scratchbuilt styrene units and for the ladders, Plastruct parts.  The piping is a mix, mostly from the Walthers Gas Works kit.    Both these elements were part of the prototype structure, just on opposite sides.  
Finally, the styrene framework structure represents an ammonia tank facility in the prototype.  I've condensed the structure by half but added some height to it.  I've used Plastruct 1/4" square tubing to represent the vertical supports and Plastruct 1/4"x3/8" rectangular tubing for the horizontals.  After capping the exposed ends I will paint this structure to represent cast concrete.  The tanks are from the Walthers Gas Works kit.

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