COKE OVENS - Part 1

Sorry for the back to back posts but I wanted to get the construction of the "new" ovens up before I got too far along.   If you read the DORR THICKENER - Part 3 posting you will understand the reasoning behind my revamping of my coke works.  One, if not the key element of the works is the ovens, and with the increased size of the works, my small oven battery wasn't going to fly.   So, if you have been following this blog, by now you know how it goes.  No need to expect the sensible thing like buying a few more Walthers kits and kitbashing longer ovens.   The new plan is to model the full, 65 oven, Thomas Coke oven battery to scale, with a few modeling liberties on the details.   Why Thomas? Thanks to the HAER documentation I have scale drawings and plenty of photos.   Even with 65 ovens, my Raritan Steel  blast furnace department will still have to import half their coke.

The Thomas coke oven battery scales out at about 66" long.  The ovens take up less space but the 66" number includes the coal bunker, and a service area at the opposite end for maintaining the door and guide cars, along with storage of five spare doors.   Do to width constraints I won't be able to model the pusher side and will have to back the model right up to the elevated main.  Hopefully, with the main line tracks hidden and adding overhead gas mains, won't give away this compromise too readily.

Core of coke ovens.  Near end is location of coal bunker and opposite end the service area.  You can see my quench car and guide car positioned on the wood core

In the past I've built the cores of some of my larger structures out of wood.  So far so good, but I haven't really finished any yet to determine 100% if this is a sound idea.  The idea of building such a long structure out of styrene entirely didn't really appeal to me and I was worried about warpage over the length, so I'm going with a wood core.  Usually I use MDF, but I'm using mostly plywood on this as the MDF would end up making this structure almost too heavy to handle properly.    

Next I'll add the brick to the top and using styrene sheet, strips, and resin cast doors, model the oven face.