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| The lack of posts is due to my work load as of late. Even with adding another full time carpenter, we have been swamped with jobs. Thanksgiving has been the first day I have had off since mid September - 75 or so straight 12-16 hour days have cut into my blogging, and modeling. But you know the old adage, "make hay while the sun shines"..... We still are overbooked through February, but will probably be able to work at a saner pace to get this work done, and we no longer are working on any projects where the homeowners have temporarily moved out (ie no temptation to work until midnight or weekends) . I did manage to pick up the new Walther's Glacier Industrial Sands kit last month. It's described as a "modern" industrial structure, specifically a sand loading facility. Some of the elements of the kit looked like they would work in my 1950's era layout, and others, well, maybe a future Free-mo module or sometimes it's just fun to build a model, even without a home for it. Comparing this to the sand loading facilities I've seen down in Cumberland County, NJ, this structure is too small for a sand, rail-loading plant. Also, the silos are always of greater diameter. That being said, there are a number of other uses for this sort of structure, including several steel mill uses. I might incorporate it into the loading facility for my ferro-manganese plant. This would be a great addition to a BOF model, for the additives. |
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| Parts in box. The usual Walther's injection molding - lame. Anyone that's ever built a Tamiya or Dragon or Trumpeter military kit knows that it could be done much, much better. Details could be crisper and the the fit of the parts could be engineered better. One thing you will notice - extra parts. The instructions, also not done as good as they could be, make note of these extra parts and suggest using them for kitbashing or details elsewhere. Although they look like random industrial parts, they aren't - they assemble into three additional structures that I will explain in a bit. |
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| These are the built structures shown on the box photo and in the instructions. The sand loading silos and elevator - a horizontal oil tank - a boring one story modern office - a purposeless three hopper something with a conveyor underneath (I guess you load the sand into the hoppers and then the conveyor dumps it back on the ground so you can scoop it up again) - and two small conveyors. The small conveyors come out pretty nice and could be used many places on a layout, including in a steel mill. The triple hopper thing could probably be arranged with one of the small conveyors to feed the smallish hopper on the sand loader. |
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| Another view of smaller structures in kit. |
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| These are the structures the "extra parts" build. The guard shack is actually described in the instructions but not shown on box photo or in diagram. You don't really need instructions to build it. Again a non-descript modern structure but the curb foundation is a nice shape. This and the office are shown without the window frames and glass. The flat thing in the foreground is a retaining wall, shown in the instructions to be used with the triple hopper thing - I guess that structure would have an embankment on the open side for loading. The beam framework on left is a shorter version of the base for the sand towers. There is a square box and hopper at the bottom of the elevator. If you don't use these parts the whole structure could be built on this frame instead. This would convert the structure from rail loading to truck loading. It's not mentioned at all in the instructions. Finally, the real bonus gem - I'm calling it the bag house/pug mill. I'm not sure what it is really intended to represent and I can't figure out the material flow. In fact, it seams to be missing some sort of input or output. Whatever it is, the elements could be used for a number of things. The one structure could be used as a bag house with a few minor details added. Another nice part is the pipe between the two pieces - this is an 1/2" exact pipe (ie you can use with Evergreen tubing) and the elbows are nicely segmented. In a future blog I will be casting more of this part and show you how to do the same. |
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| Mystery machine - that a wide belt conveyor on the right end of the closest structure element. There is no reference to this structure in the instructions so you need to cut out the parts and backwards engineer it. I enjoyed this and only had to flip one or two parts around. If there is an interest from people building this kit, I could post some close ups to help. . |
7 comments:
Jim,
This appears to be the same kit,rebranded,from Walther's asphalt series a few years back.I have one,still in the box. I think the baghouse/pug mill,as you called it, is actually a kiln
(in WKW's compressed version)to fire and blend the oil and fine stone that would be needed to make asphalt. Please do post pix of your work on this,especially the casting of the pipe segments so that I can follow your lead-when you have time of course.
Glad to hear your business is booming !!
You are correct Vince. I didn't remember that kit but looked it up and it's the new sand plant exactly plus the extra parts - I guess there is a sucker born every minute and I happen to be the one this minute. Well it was still an interesting kit that I will use, and fun building half of it without instructions. Gigantic oil tank makes sense now, as do the hoppers to no where. - Jim
It appears that the guard shack and office building are from the Yard Office kit. WKW seems to use these components in a number of their industrial structure kits. I'd like to see a rock crusher, which I understand at one time was part of the original Glacier Gravel kit, but of course more expensive.
The square structure is a baghouse. The round item is a rotating drum called a dryer/mixer. The dry aggregates that make up hot mix asphalt are fed into the dryer, which has a forced air heater that blasts hot air into the dryer as it rotates, drying and mixing the aggreagates. As the dryer mixer rotates the finer dust particles are sucked up the large tube at one end of the dryer/mixer via a large blower/fan that looks like a huge squirrel cage blower, and transported to the baghouse. The baghouse is filled with a large number of canvas like bags hung vertically inside the baghouse, upwards of a hundred in a large unit. The dust laden air is forced through these bags, about 18-24" in diameter and about 15' long. The bags capture the dust, preventing it from escaping into the air around the asphalt plant, and the surrounding area. This kind of dust collection is mandated by environmental regulations. Without such equipment the flour-fine dust would cover everything within a mile or more of the plant, every minute the plant is producing asphalt. This used to be accomplished by a wet-wash method where the dust filled air was forced into collection ponds. The baghouse system is much more efficient.
I can provide you with full and detailed info on how a hot mix asphalt plant works and should be configured if you'd like. There are a good many parts missing if what you have is all that came with the kit. Most of the missing parts can either be purchased individually or scratchbuilt. There are two types of hot mix plants, but you don't show enough parts for either configuration.
Perhaps the "bag house/pug mill" is described in this web page.
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/unwork.htm
Mikethor63
Thanks Rod for the info on the asphalt plant. I figured the one structure was a bag house, abet, a small one for using in steel mills. I built this kit for the components and don't plan on actually using it as a sand loading facility or it's apparent previous configuration, an asphalt plant. If anyone is doing so, please feel free to post here if you need more info from Rod on the structure. I did have a question about the bags - you said they "capture the dust" Do you mean like a vacuum cleaner bag. My understanding was that the bags act as a filter but don't actually collect dust per se, other than what clings to the outside. The bags have a mechanical system to beat them or vibrate them to clean off dust in their filter fabric, but the dust itself ends up in the bottom of the bag house structure, usually a hopper bottom, and from there is dumped directly into a truck or rail car, or conveyed by air to a large silo, where it is stored and loaded into trucks.
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