Finally, Time for a Sail

C-FURNACE - Part 1

With the demise of our Free-Mo modules, I found a spot out our basement layout for Jimmy's Walther Blast Furnace - Now, Raritan Steel C-Furnace.    There was no room left for it at the lower works, but I was able to find room for it in the  State Street Works, along with the Electric Melt Shop/Steel Foundry and a rolling mill.   The smallish nature of the newer (than a and b) blast furnace was a mystery to mill workers until it became known that it was to be used for the production of Ferromanganese.  The ferro made here will be used within Raritan Steel's Perth Amboy Facility, along with their other mills in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.    Work will start soon on the associated Ferro gas washing plant and the ferro processing and loading facility.   The company shops have also began designing the special "hot metal" cars for Ferro - refractory lined gondolas.    The blast furnace Jimmy built for the Free-mo module used a conveyor type materials delivery system.  Since we are back dating the furnace to the 1950's I've built the skip hoist and high-line that came with the original kit, with a few modifications.     I've added some styrene angle to the skip hoist and I've bricked in the visible side of the high-line.  Simple ore bins were added to the high-line so you weren't looking down on the benchwork.

  

The primitive ore and coke bins were just made from some .060 styrene sheet

Wish I was in Cleveland,....    For those of you tuning in to see photos of the Steel Mill Modelers Convention in Cleveland, well, I never made it.   Work has been hectic and I waited until the last minute to register at the hotel and by the time I got to it, there were no rooms left.  I started to work on find an alternative hotel to stay at, but then a nice potential job came up that I had to meet an architect at on friday, so,....     As I'd promised my wife a weekend get away, we did an short overnight trip to an inn at St Michaels, Maryland.   Show here is the marine railway and boat shops at the maritime museum.

Driveway  to the  Maritime Museum.  Nice way to display a historic draw bridge

TOOL REVIEW

Despite selling some shaky tools, you can occasionally find a good deal for an acceptable tool.    Drilling the #76 hand hold holes in resin gets tedious with pin vises and are a primary reason that I put these kits down for long periods of time  before returning to them.   I've had mixed results with Dremel tools, their drawback being their weight and power.   Ideally I have been looking for a lightweight rotary tool, that doesn't have to be super powerful - in fact - the weaker the better so not to break these fragile bits.    Enter Harbor Freight - this dremel type tool, called the "Drillmaster" had what I was looking for, and at $6.99 (with a coupon - $9.99 current "sale" price)  I took the chance.  The tool is very light and uses a 12v motor, powered by an included wall wart 500ma 12v transformer.   The cord is light wire and even has a male/female connector so the cord attached to the tool can be unplugged from the cord attached to the transformer.  Combined the length of these cords is very generous.   It also came with a shitload of rotary tooling - pretty much everything that comes with a Dremel, abet a little junkier, but also a lot of other things that don't, like a tube of a dozen or more end mills, 5 or 6 collets, drills, a whole tube of cutoff wheels,....etc..   The end mills are a bonus as I use these a lot to cut plastic and usually pay $6-8 each.   The machine runs smooth and with less noise than a Dremel.  Seems to have the power to do what I want.

Part two to this rotary tool equation were the micro end mills that Harbor Freight also sells.   Both boxes come as a set for $7    These are mostly metric, some match common drill sizes with a mixture from #54 through #88   There are multiples in the set and a few larger one, but there are a half dozen at least in the 70s.  These aren't drills, but rather end mills, which, when thinking about it are probably better for drilling holes in resin castings.   Also, the heavy shank is easier to chuck into a collet in the tool, and I hope will make them less susceptible to breaking as only a third of the shaft is the delicate smaller diameter.    I tried the #77 first and smooth as silk drilling with, however, the #76 that came with the set was a little wobbly.   I haven't tried the others yet.  

My hand for scale, although I have large hands.   I like the switch and the chuck is easy to change without tools.  Notice the end mill set that came with the tool.    The green round thing is a tube of cutoff wheels - again - that alone is a $7 dremel item.    I'm going back this weekend and pick up another two or three tools.  Probably will keep a #77 in one, a 1/16" in the other (for wheels and couplers) and an end mill cutter in the other.  Actually, maybe I need four.   Since the cord has the plug on it, I can just use one transformer and plug and unplug the drills - use the other transformers to power switch machines.  

Bessemer Building and More

I started building the truss and column assemblies for my bessemer plant.   Originally I was going to need 9 of these, but I scaled back to 7.  Some prototype photos of Bessemer plants with the converters on the exterior of the building piqued my interest, so I changed my design a little.   I will still need to build some sort of framework, just not with the roof trusses.   The almost assembled truss (missing the corner braces) is sitting in the assembly jig - a simple affair - scrap 1/4" MDF with some balsa blocking glued to it (white glue)

 

The trusses started off from the Walter's Electric Furnace Kits.   The purist in me is fading as the years move on and I only have two scratch-built trusses on my soaking pit building and only one on the blast furnace.  Despite the modifications, this was far easier to do.   I believe I spoke of the components in an earlier post, but if not - I cut the truss down, for length and to give the roof an interesting look.   It was extended with a piece of .030 sheet to match my footing spacing.  I used .030 x .250 strips to wrap the pieces, creating the wide flanges.   The posts are a 1/4" column with Central Valley box lattice columns.  

Day trip - Princeton - shopping, bookstore, Thomas Sweet Ice Cream/  Dunellen - The Model Railroad Shop - Central Valley stuff for Bessemer plant, magazines, a F&C Resin heavy duty well flat, six axles,  and DVD - Big Little Railroad  (1948 film by CNJ promoting their railroad - steam/early diesel - I had this on video tape but think I lent it out a long time ago, but regardless, was happy to buy a DVD copy, plus there was extra footage of the famous Ashley Planes and the Newark Bay four-track Drawbridge.   Interestingly, there was some real good film of the Huber Breaker in full operation, which I had visited two weekends prior.  

The Model Railroad Club - Union New Jersey - Haven't been here since the 1980s  I think they added on, but couldn't remember.  This is a photo of the smaller n-scale layout on the second level.  They have a decent sized steel mill - Mostly Walthers structures.   The larger HO layout will have a steel mill too but that area, along with about 2/3rds of the layout are unfinished.  They had a very well done cement plant and a few other nice industrial complexes.  It's a very large club in terms of building size, but only one person was working on the unfinished section that day.   I managed to drag Glori into the club (she liked a HO vegetable garden and clothes line)  on the condition that we visit the animal shelter next store.   So that basically ended the day on a depressingly sad note.  

gfsfgdg

Anthracite

Ok, so not much has changed - to celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary - I took my wife down into a coal mine.

Huber Breaker - Ashley,PA

BLACK AND WHITE

No modeling photos as they would just be of more railings and platforms on A-Furnace stoves - seems endless.   I was going through my box of photos/slides/and negatives sitting on my office floor and I pulled out some old (1986-89) black and white negatives.   For most of my college years - 1984-88 - and into the very early 90's, I shot everything in either black and white or color slides.   I didn't have a lot of money so black and white was an cheap way to shoot everything, without breaking the bank.  I processed all the film myself  in a darkroom at the student center at school, and then after, in a darkroom I set up in my apartment.   I even bought the black and white film in bulk rolls and loaded film canisters myself - almost as cheap as digital photography.   I would process the negatives and make a proof sheet of the entire roll.   Select photos would be printed, but paper was expensive, especially after college, so I limited myself.  The result was that I never actually saw full size prints of most of my shots, and over time forgot a lot of the subject matter.   Scanners make it easy now to see what's on these negatives full size.   Since a lot of what I took photos of has since been demolished, it's kind of exciting scanning this film.    One embarrassing discovery, on the heels of my 25th wedding anniversary in a few days, was the quantity of railroad and industrial photos I took on my honeymoon.  My beautiful young wife lost out to locomotives and factories on a 20:1 ratio.     This shot is Bethlehem Steel in 1987 -  the mill was in full operation, but clouds were on the horizon.   In the center of the photo is the approach to the high-line.  The track on the right is the standard gauge coke track, while the left track is the dual gauge (7'11") ore and stone track.   The overhead catenary is only for the wide gauge ore/stone electric transfer cars.    Diesels moved the coke hoppers.

Bethlehem Steel 1987 - BOF.  In foreground is the additives conveyor

Bethlehem Steel 1987 - Underneath where I was standing to take this photo was the plant railroad shops - Narrow (3' gauge), dual, and standard gauge tracks fanning out to shops.   The highline is on the right, and in the distance you can see the five blast furnaces.  #2 Machine Shop is on the left.

Narrow Gauge Locomotive - Bethlehem Steel 1987

Honeymoon 1988 - Morehead City, NC -  They were still running Whitcomb's - A guy get's a romantic exemption for that - Right?