scratch building a steel mill

[steamfreightboy]

How would molten steel travel from the EAF to the rolling mill?

[Heartland_Division_C]

The steel would be in slabs as it moved to the rolling mill.

[steamfreightboy]

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’.

Here is a panoramic view of the Erie Forge.

http

[jwhitten]

http://www.zahkunst.net/mainpage.htm - I bet this model even amazes Dean Freytag

Alas, not any more.

(But maybe heaven will send him to you so you can help him get his wings… [angel])

John

[Hamltnblue]

A member at our club is doing just that and scratch building several sections of one.

I’ll try to remember to take pics.

[steamfreightboy]

Progress report #001: I installed an operating slag dump on the layout and just started (finally) the BOF today. I am using a cut up corrugated cardboard box to build it, which I will eventually paint grey.

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:

http://www.scalescenes.com/scratchbuilders-yard

However, the box only made two walls for the BOF, so for the far walls and for the EAF (to be modeled after erie forge & steel) and finishing building I think I will use the scalescenes corrugated iron siding. My finishing building will look somewhat generic, and depending on the mood I am in, I can simply change the cars going into and out of to have it represent a different product being produced (i.e. one day a rolling mill for coils, the next a pipe mill, then a specialty parts mill on the third day). What do all you guys think about this idea? I will post pictures when I can.

sfb

Post #199!

[railandsail]

If one was really trying to shrink down the size of a ‘steel scene’ by making use of just the Walther’s blast furance, then a painted backdrop,…something like this, what sort of minimum footprint would that blast furnance need to occupy ??

[caldreamer]

I scratch built my N scale Hulett ore unloader using the plans from the Oct 1997 Railroad Model Craftman article. It took me three months to do it right. It was a lot of fun. I have the dock where the ore is unloaded behind my steel mill.