I have been looking at the walthers Ashland Iron & steel and would like to have a blast furnace and rolling mill on my layout, but it is not within my buget. I have a lot of time on my hands, so I may want to scratch build or kitbash. do you have any tips, pointers, or ways of scrachbuilding?
Scratch building is perfectly possible and fun. A steel mill is a large and ambitious project. especially if it is your first scratch build. Was it me I’d try something a little smaller and simpler for my first project. I scratch built a small passenger station, starting with color photographs of the original taken on an overcast day which softened the shadows. Try for straight on shots that fill the view finder of the front, back, and sides. Take closeups of details like gutters, windows, roof braces and what ever.
From the photo’s I drew a scale drawing on squared paper. I obtained dimensions from the photo using a pair of dividers. Set the dividers to something of known size, say a doorway which is usually eight feet. Step off the major dimensions (height, width,depth), and then convert to feet. For instance if it takes 6 and 1/2 steps of dividers set to 8 feet to step out the length of the building then the building lenght is 6.5 * 8 = 52 feet. Lay out the dimensions on the squared paper using a scale ruler. I used an HO scale ruler to draw plans full size for HO. You can use rulers in other scales to make drawing in other scales.
Materials can be foamcore board, cardstock, sheet basswood, sheet balsa, or thin plywood, or … You can make brick paper and other textures with a color inkjet printer. Likewise signage. Those clear plastic sandwich and muffin cartons from the supermarket yield good window glazing. Mailing tubes or plastic pipe can form round things like tanks, silo’s and perhaps blast furnaces.
Tools can be very simple. I made the station will little more than a scale rule, dividers and an Xacto knife. Plus sharp pencils.
Good luck.
steamfreightboy - Excellent thought! Scratchbuilding a steel mill is tons of fun and takes TONS of hours, depending on the level of detail you want. Doing a rolling mill would be pretty easy, get a couple of sheets of corrrugated metal (from Plastruct.com) in your scale and just make it look like the Walther’s one. I have three rolling mills on my N-scale layout all about 5’ long, the first was kitbashed from a few Walther’s kits and the other two are completely scratch built. The blast furnace could be a bit tougher but certainly not impossible. I have also scratch built a 72 oven coke battery, BOF, EAF, continous caster, coke/coal loading/unloading facility and many other support buildings. Not trying to brag, just saying all is possible so long as you have the time.
You will need to make a few decisions first like;
-
What era are you modeling? Steel mills are vastly different than they were just 20, 30 or 40 years ago.
-
How much space can you alot to the mill? The more the better.
-
Interior detail or exterior walls only? Exterior only will save you a lot of time or you can also build exteriors and come back later to finish interior detail but, make sure you plan that in.
-
Mini mill or integrated mill or somewhere in between?
I would advise you to do a lot of research and looking at pics before you decide either way. Here are some resources you may be able to use. PM me if you want more as I have tons.
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9512/Beazley-9512.html - virtual reality EAF, caster, reversing mill
Almost forgot, wether you are HO or N, look around for a Walthers rolling mill BEFORE they added the actual reversing stand to the HO model. Either scale it is just the building shell and would provide a perfect jumping off point into scratch building. Should be less than $40.
The Walthers Ashland Iron & Steel Blast Furnace is 17¨x 27 x 23 height Even with all the numbered pieces to cut out (from random sheets), it took no something like 40 hours to complete the structure. My next project is to install UV lighting to get the ribbon flowing molten iron to glow. The photo shows the scratch built ore boat with the cardboard footprint of the two Hulett Unloaders that will be delivered in July. They each span 4 tracks with a rear track to serve the Blast Furnace and Rolling Mill The second photo shows the slag being dumped from the Slag car. It glows due to light from a hidden Black light.
The entire setup of ore boat, unlpaders and parallel Blast Furnace and Rolling Mill occupies about 3ftx5ft
The Slag cars and Bottle cars can be cut and pivoted quite easily. The Molten iron core in the slag car is half of the plactic cover of a Silly Putty container, then painted with fluoescent yellow orange.
To see other views of my layout, click the photos and then on the photos in the upper left.
sfb:
Take a look at the April 1994 MR. One of the photos of his “Nashwaak Valley” shows a freelanced blast furnace Ted Grey built largely out of shampoo bottles and other packaging. It was nifty, and just the thing for a tight budget!
Take a look around you and see what you can find that looks like a furnace. You might find a plastic tumbler or juice pitcher that is just right. Who cares what’s under the paint? The large, boxy buildings could be easily built out of posterboard, with Scalescenes printed windows and brick or corrugated iron siding (download one image for about five bucks and laser-print as many as you like at the office-supply store). You might even make your own corrugated siding a la E. L. Moore, or even use flat strips of paper, giving the building a heavy coat of black, smoky weathering with lots of streaking. I bet nobody would even miss the corrugations.
Scalescenes:
I really liked Fretytags little foundry he covered in MR. Just wish it had more indepth construction details. I still think of making a version at the back of my head, but it doesn’t really fit into any of my model plans anymore.
Here’s a couple of links to web pages of structures I scratchbuilt. The ore bridge was all scratch, the blast furnace was scratchbuilt except for the cast house which I cannibalized from an old Walthers kit.
Be prepared to spend a huge number of evenings and weekends if you go this route…good luck!
[quote user=“spearo”]
steamfreightboy - Excellent thought! Scratchbuilding a steel mill is tons of fun and takes TONS of hours, depending on the level of detail you want. Doing a rolling mill would be pretty easy, get a couple of sheets of corrrugated metal (from Plastruct.com) in your scale and just make it look like the Walther’s one. I have three rolling mills on my N-scale layout all about 5’ long, the first was kitbashed from a few Walther’s kits and the other two are completely scratch built. The blast furnace could be a bit tougher but certainly not impossible. I have also scratch built a 72 oven coke battery, BOF, EAF, continous caster, coke/coal loading/unloading facility and many other support buildings. Not trying to brag, just saying all is possible so long as you have the time.
You will need to make a few decisions first like;
-
What era are you modeling? Steel mills are vastly different than they were just 20, 30 or 40 years ago.
-
How much space can you alot to the mill? The more the better.
-
Interior detail or exterior walls only? Exterior only will save you a lot of time or you can also build exteriors and come back later to finish interior detail but, make sure you plan that in.
-
Mini mill or integrated mill or somewhere in between?
I would advise you to do a lot of research and looking at pics before you decide either way. Here are some resources you may be able to use. PM me if you want more as I have tons.
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9512/Beazley-9512.html - virtual reality EAF, caster, reversing mill
sfb:
If you like the rolling mill, why not just have that? In Franklin, PA, there’s a rolling mill that makes steel posts out of used rail. They receive the old rail in gondola cars.
http://www.franklinindustriesco.com/
A long metal building and a few smaller ones, plus a storage yard for rail and stacks of posts, could make a nice model in a small space.
You can also have a stand-alone blast furnace, producing pig iron for foundries. These were sometimes quite small. A few, at least, lasted into the late steam era. Maybe some are still going, for all I know. The blast furnace is one of the more interesting and distinctive mill structures.
Here’s a very well-shot and atmospheric photo of a small steel mill:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3250/2753386764_d6e57bdae6.jpg
It’s the Erie Forge & Steel Plant, an electric-furnace shop. I’m not sure what they’re doing with it nowadays; the company is basically in the heavy machining business now. I think it’s a very neat-looking building, which would make a convincing model even in highly compressed form, and has enough detail with the ductwork and baghouse to say “Steel” to an observer. Across the street from this place is a vacuum-arc remelt shop, nothing more than a large metal building, painted blue.
Looking around the HABS/HAER archives, you could probably turn up many examples of small and interesting steel mills. Build a copy, and you’d draw plenty of attention, simply for having a steel mill that wasn’t Walthers’. [:D]
In German, but no worries. The pictures speak for themselves.
More at http://stummi.foren-city.de/topic,28818,-mein-huettenwerk.html
I have decided to get rid of the dairy. As soon as I figure out how, I will have a picture of the track plan.[:I]
[quote user=“spearo”]
steamfreightboy - Excellent thought! Scratchbuilding a steel mill is tons of fun and takes TONS of hours, depending on the level of detail you want. Doing a rolling mill would be pretty easy, get a couple of sheets of corrrugated metal (from Plastruct.com) in your scale and just make it look like the Walther’s one. I have three rolling mills on my N-scale layout all about 5’ long, the first was kitbashed from a few Walther’s kits and the other two are completely scratch built. The blast furnace could be a bit tougher but certainly not impossible. I have also scratch built a 72 oven coke battery, BOF, EAF, continous caster, coke/coal loading/unloading facility and many other support buildings. Not trying to brag, just saying all is possible so long as you have the time.
You will need to make a few decisions first like;
-
What era are you modeling? Steel mills are vastly different than they were just 20, 30 or 40 years ago.
-
How much space can you alot to the mill? The more the better.
-
Interior detail or exterior walls only? Exterior only will save you a lot of time or you can also build exteriors and come back later to finish interior detail but, make sure you plan that in.
-
Mini mill or integrated mill or somewhere in between?
I would advise you to do a lot of research and looking at pics before you decide either way. Here are some resources you may be able to use. PM me if you want more as I have tons.
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9512/Beazley-9512.html - virtual reality EAF, caster, reversing mill
http://www.hfinster.de/StahlArt2/Tours-en.html - Industrial Photo Gallery, lots of mill building pics
They are there under the model blogs! As well as video!
You might want to price out the plaststruct. It isn’t cheap stuff! Buying a rolling mill might actually be cheaper just for the corrogated sheet siding!
I checked it out and it says N, O, and OO. Is HO scale the same as OO?[X-)]
sfbb:
OO is just slightly larger than HO…about 12%. It’s close enough to work fine, although if you were really picky, you could have the sheets printed at 90% actual size and be just about perfect.
(Come to think of it, I may have done that when I had mine printed last time.)
SFB -
“I do not have a specific prototype, but would it be easier if I have one?”
Prototype, No…type, Yes. There are many different types of steel mills. Some called an integrated mill supply all their own raw materials such as coal and iron ore and melt them in a blast furnace, usually, then on to a BOF or AOD and then on to casting. (Forgive me if I ramble or am supplying info you all ready know) Others called mini-mills consist of usually just an EAF, caster and a rolling mill. Mini-mills use almost 100% scrap metal for material to be melted so they do not have to worry about iron ore, coal, coke and the related processes/buildings that go along with those operations hence, mini-mills are much smaller than integrated mills. Don’t worry, mini-mills are still HUGE operations. If you are going for a 4x8 layout in HO an integrated mill is a possibility but a mini-mill may be a better use of your space. The HO BF has a footprint of 28x17 and the rolling mill is 32x12 which is a little over 5 sq/ft, that’s alot out of 32 sq/ft on a 4x8 table.
I searched for any pics of Erie Forge, now National Forge, but didn’t find anytihng usefull. Try Google Earth, look up an address for Erie and then plug that into Google, should give you a nice bird’s eye view.
Glad to help, let me know if you need anything else.
Two good info articles about “The Forge”
http://www.globalerie.com/stevesrnka/2008/05/01/steel-city-erie/
http://www.americancapital.com/news/newsreleases/2000/pr20000322.html
For pictures from the air, try these sites
http://maps.google.com/maps - type in the address
http://www.bing.com/ - click on maps, type in the address, then in the map window click on “bird’s eye view”
address;
1341 West 16th Street - Erie, PA 16502
would like some help on building a continous caster, thanks gary
By the time you add all the scratch built materials from both evergreen and plastruct it would cost you an arm and a leg more than if you bought the walthers kits. Case in point, corrigated siding is outragiously expensive from plastruct. Because of this, the rolling mill comes out cheaper than if you had scratch built it yourself.
Edit: I see this thread has been brought back to life.
For tips on continuous casters, you might want to research the yahoo Steel group for tips, pictures, and information.
That being said, I’ve read and seen models of CC’s built by just placing a rolling mill beside an electric furnace.