ELECTRIC MELT SHOP - Part 7

The few hours I've been able to get into the basement in the past week, have been spent mostly on non-steel tasks - more track laying - decoder installs - starting some scenery - and generally planing things.    I did pick up the Walther's Heavy Duty Crane kit for the electric melt shop.  I actually have three of these on order for elsewhere in the plant.  For the price you get a basic crane assembly that will save a lot of scratchbuilding hours.  It is, as are most Walther's kits, slightly incomplete and under-detailed.   After building the model pretty much per the instructions, I've started to detail the crane using mostly styrene shapes.   In the picture you can see the drive motor, transmission, and drive shaft that was added to the one side of the crane.  I still need to add the electrical contacts for the trolleys along this side and then a walkway on the other.  These simple things add some "mass" to the model.   By the way - these ideas are mostly from Dean Freytag's Cyclopedia.    

A second picture shows a slightly blurry ladle from the electric furnace kit being upgraded with a refractory lining, new trunnions, and a tilting bracket.

COMICS

Some of you folks that were at the Steel Mill Modelers Meet a few months ago might have seen the USS Joe Magarac comic that John Glabb had a slide of.  I actually have a copy of that comic book, and a second one that US Steel put out.  The Joe Magarac comic is interesting, but the other comic, just titled Steel, is actually an excellent primer on how steel is made from iron ore and turned into a finished product.   These are the covers of both,  and a page from the Steel comic.

ELECTRIC MELT SHOP - Part 6

Funny thing happened earlier tonight.  I pulled the electric melt shop interior out to add a trestle/floor to carry 30" gauge track and add a few other items, and my son asked what I thought was a stupid question at the time - "Is that going to fit in the building?"   I answered, "of course".  After all, I must have checked the fit at one time - right? - well apparently not.   It was a simple fix - I had to cut off the walkway to the right of the transformer vault and a corresponding amount of foundation beneath.    

One thing I have been doing a lot lately is looking at a lot of electric furnace photos.  From what I can tell, there were two ways of charging them - either by a side door, or by moving the furnace top  to one side.  The top loading seams to be pretty universal after the 1960s and Brandon Wehe makes an excellent bottom discharge scrap bucket that would be used for this purpose.  However, at least at Bethlehem Steel (Lehigh) in the 1950s, scrap and additives were loaded through a side door using conventional open hearth scrap trays or buckets.  It makes sense, after all, the melt shop at Bethlehem was originally an open hearth facility.   I will be using this latter method for two reasons - fidelity to the prototype, and to give a little running room to the 30" narrow gauge track (the electric melt shop is within the blast furnace section of the plant and about six feet or so from the bessemer and open hearth steel facility.)    The idea is that all the scrap prep and loading into the narrow gauge trains will be at one location in the steel making section of the plant.   My narrow gauge system is not just for show but I intend to include it in the operating scheme.

So - tonight - besides the modifications for size reasons, an elevated platform for the narrow gauge track was added and attached to the rest of the furnace assembly.  Also, I worked on the transfer car for the hot steel ladles. 

Narrow Gauge - Part 6

No more work on the locomotive tonight.  I did begin to rough out a general purpose car that I can replicate pretty fast and cheaply without resorting to resin casting.   It's a basic design using styrene, but it looks pretty good.   After these pictures were taken I added covers to the axle bearings, which improved the overall appearance.  I still need to add some angle or some other structural stuff to the axle bearings to act as additional supports and give this part of the model some more detail.  I also need to pick up some HOn3 couplers for the loco and cars.    The car will hold four seven foot scrap boxes (by Ken Ray Models)  or two 11-ton ingot molds.  The latter might be pushing it as the car has some big overhangs.  Seven tons or less might work better.  

Narrow Gauge - Part 5

Cab - nothing really to explain here, just straight up model building.  I did leave out the cab interior and instead stuffed it with lead right up to the window sills.

Narrow Gauge - Part 4

The drivetrain - 

First you build the transmission.  This is mostly just a few gears and then a retainer that doesn't work so well - I started to worry a bit here as I was getting a little binding.  I fiddled with it and corrected it, but I didn't feel the gear retainer was seated properly.    After this you need to take the motor and install the worm gear, followed by the transmission, and then a brass contact bar.  The whole assembly is held together by a few more delrin parts, all just pressed on or fitted - no glue.   Oh, and most importantly, the motor has to be oriented a specific way otherwise you probably won't get electric contact. Also, oil the gears a bit.

One of the sideframes gets three gears - the motor only powers one axle, so this is the way of driving the other.   The gears sit in the frame and then you press the frame on and they are held in by that big flat piece I was wondering the purpose of.   Now the fun part - as I am modeling HOn30, and this is an HOn3 locomotive, you need to regauge the wheelsets.  I did this by taking off the outer axle gears - they fit on the rounded end of the axle if you loose track.   I then put the wheels in a vise and slowly pushed them together until we were at HOn30.  I had to compare the two and balance things out a bit, but it worked.  - Yeah.   Now you need to put the axle gears back on and then install the wheel sets - there is a front and a back - into the sideframe with the gears.  The gears need to mesh and then carefully install the opposite frame.  It's a bit tricky and make sure the gears don't bind.  

Now, the motor assembly.  First you will need to bend in the pick-up wires a little to fit the HOn30 wheelset.  Then the motor sort of just drops right in.   Careful that the brass wires from the early step make contact where they are supposed to.  Now you can throw it on some track and see if it runs or not.  At first mine sputtered and then sort of ran but didn't move a whole lot - one of the axle gears was slipping, on the non-driven axle.  I used a touch of ACC to bond this to the axle and then the locomotive started to move.  I could tell right away that weight would help this locomotive a lot.  There isn't a whole lot of room to put weight other than the cab - so I would have to sacrifice the interior cab details in light of having a better running locomotive.  

Narrow Gauge - Part 3

No operating sessions tonight due to a regional NMRA conference, so I was able to sit down and take a crack at the Grandt Line GE 25 Ton Loco.    As I've said in the last one or two narrow gauge blogs, the Grandt Line loco looks great - perfect for my steel plant narrow gauge.  Most of the other narrow gauge diesels available - the Minitrain and Roco stuff, and then my attempt at the F&C Kit - they all have one thing in common - they look smallish - cute for a replicant Maine 2-footer, but not sufficiently industrial.  One of the pictures is from the internet showing the look I'm going for - taken at the Bethlehem Steel (Lehigh) Electric Furnace Shop.  (By the way - one of the down the road projects will be a multiple resin casting of the cars shown)   Now of course, the only problem with this whole plan is the Grandt Line POS (piece of sh*t) motor and transmission.   Either the folks at Grandt Line have a sadistic streak, or more likely, just like having a high profit margin -  I suspect the latter as this $50 kit has about 4 ounces of delrin and styrene castings and a 50 cent motor.   Well, I'll tell you the ending now - it runs slightly better than I expected,  and so long as I keep it well oiled and the track clean I should be able to operate the open hearth and the bessemer plant with a small fleet of these.  

On to the construction - I will have to do this in multiple parts as I think I can only post four pictures or so per blog.  

The construction of this locomotive is broken down into sub assemblies.  The instructions are complete and have all the information you will need, but most times you will want to read each section twice and carefully look at the pictures.  To get to a running locomotive with a shell, but still a fair amount of details - like couplers, railings, and some other detail parts left, took me four and a half hours.  I probably have another two hours to completion.  

The first subassembly was the under frame.  You need to ACC a few parts to the flat frame piece - the parts won't seem to have any function, but later you will understand why they are there.   This assembly also involves bending a few pieces of very thin brass wire - two are for wheel pick-ups and the other is to tie into the motor brush contact.  Again,  they won't seem to make any sense, but eventually you will have that a ha moment.  Bend the first pickup wire to the shape on the plans - you will need a fine pair of needle nose to get the shape - this pushes through the crossbar piece and then fans out into the two wheel pick-ups - in both cases there is a plastic cap that goes on to hold the wire in place.  You will also leave about an 1/8" of the wire loop on the opposite side of the frame - this will later make contact with the motor housing.   You can see this wire by itself in the one picture. The next wire is sort of a bus connector - the photo show the fancy bend and also the 3/4" piece of insulation on the wire - this will attach the second pickup wire to the motor brush contact.  Then you bend the second pickup wire to the pattern - insert - glue plastic retainer - then, the tricky part, solder the bus connector to the pick-up, without melting anything - use a low wattage soldering iron.  Then you add a few more plastic parts to the frame and you are done with this assembly.