Unfortunately, Walthers has discontinued their latest run of their blast furnace for the Ashland Iron & Steel series, 933-2973. It had an MSRP of $263.98 in the 2016 catalog. The ones on Ebay have been going for at least that much and usually more, assuming you can find one. Walthers had an initial run of this kit back in the 1990's when they did their USS series, as far as I can tell there is no difference between the two kits. Those are still floating around and are also fetching close to $300 on Ebay.
Looks like I'm going to have to scratchbuild one. Fortunately there is a group on Yahoo Groups that is dedicated to the modeling of steel mills. There is a great deal of information available there to assist in building steel mill facilities.
Today I made a trip to Rob's Trains in Alliance, OH to raid his Plastruct and Evergreen styrene stock. $120 worth of I-beams, tubing, railings, stairways, and corrugated sheet should give me a good start on the project. Unfortunately he didn't have a lot of what I was looking for, so I will have to get the rest online.
Here is the best photo I can find of the blast furnace that was part of the Republic Steel bolt & nut factory. There is very little information available on this facility. Really all I know is it was built sometime around the late 1800's and it was torn down around 1935.
Blast furnace technology in the late 1800's to early 1900's didn't evolve much other than they kept getting bigger to allow for more production. Some blast furnaces had different features than others but the basic technology was the same.
The #1 blast furnace at Monessen Works near Pittsburgh was constructed in 1913. That will be my model to base my scratchbuilding project on. Thanks to HAER, there are scale drawings available on the internet.
Fortunately since I am basically freelancing my blast furnace on a real world structure that was torn down about 80 years ago, I will have a lot of discretion to exactly how it will be laid out. I think using the Monessen structure as a guide will get me pretty darn close.
Looks like I'm going to have to scratchbuild one. Fortunately there is a group on Yahoo Groups that is dedicated to the modeling of steel mills. There is a great deal of information available there to assist in building steel mill facilities.
Today I made a trip to Rob's Trains in Alliance, OH to raid his Plastruct and Evergreen styrene stock. $120 worth of I-beams, tubing, railings, stairways, and corrugated sheet should give me a good start on the project. Unfortunately he didn't have a lot of what I was looking for, so I will have to get the rest online.
Here is the best photo I can find of the blast furnace that was part of the Republic Steel bolt & nut factory. There is very little information available on this facility. Really all I know is it was built sometime around the late 1800's and it was torn down around 1935.
Blast furnace technology in the late 1800's to early 1900's didn't evolve much other than they kept getting bigger to allow for more production. Some blast furnaces had different features than others but the basic technology was the same.
The #1 blast furnace at Monessen Works near Pittsburgh was constructed in 1913. That will be my model to base my scratchbuilding project on. Thanks to HAER, there are scale drawings available on the internet.
Fortunately since I am basically freelancing my blast furnace on a real world structure that was torn down about 80 years ago, I will have a lot of discretion to exactly how it will be laid out. I think using the Monessen structure as a guide will get me pretty darn close.
No comments:
Post a Comment