who can i get kits for HO scale steel mills from? i only have a shelf layout and its only wide enough for mabe 2 buildings, but i dont mind if they are low relief or not (if not i could always make them low relief)
I first got the idea when i saw some of those ingot buggies. what are they used for and what part of the mill would they be used?
thanks,
Sean
Ingots are not used as much nowadays in steelmaking, having been replaced by the continuous casting process. When ingots were in use, the ingot buggies carried the empty ingot moulds to the openhearth shop, BOF, or arc furnace where the steel was made. When the steel was ready to be “tapped”, it was “teemed” into the moulds, usually from a large ladle supported by an overhead crane. The string of buggies carrying the filled moulds would be pulled from the building and taken somewhere to sit while the steel solidified. The amount of time that the steel would sit was determined by the size and type of the ingots and by the grade of the steel. At the steel plant where I worked, ingots ranged from about 4 tons to 26 tons, and there were hundreds of grades. Normally, the ideal was to strip the moulds from the steel as soon as the hold time had expired, as the sooner they were stripped, the sooner that they could be charged into a soaking pit, where they would be reheated for rolling into slabs or billets. Hot ingots obviously take a lot less time and energy to bring to rolling temperature, which varied between 2300 and 2400 degrees. When our facility went to continuous casting, the moulds, and the stools on which they sat, were scrapped, but the buggies continued in service carrying slabs from the caster, since the cast slabs were about the same length as the ingot buggies. Technological changes eventually resulted in a demand for larger slabs, and the buggies were finally phased out in favour of rubber-tired Kress carriers.
Wayne
I’m afraid that if you want something like the Walthers Blast Furnace, it has been retired. The best bet for this is E-bay.
But since you have a shelf layout and you probably don’t have much room, take a look at the Plastruct Flat Front kits.
http://www.plastruct.com/Pages/OnlineCatalogDetail.lasso?GraphicKey=KIT-30
If you want to run ingot buggies, you don’t have to model the blast furnace, as it was used only to produce iron for the steelmaking process. All of the steelmaking facilities that I’m familiar with were housed inside of large buildings, so a low-relief backgound building (as big as you can make it[:D]) could represent the open hearth, BOF, or arc furnace, from whence the loaded ingot buggies come, and another low relief building could represent the slabbing or billet mill that rolls the ingots. In between the two is the stripper building, no where near as large as the other two, but, at least in my experience, almost totally open at both ends and open along the lower portions of both sides. An interesting operation to model, but not if you’re looking for a ready-to-use operation. If you have room to run a track or two behind one of the low relief buildings, you could pull the buggies with the full moulds from your steelmaking building, run the drag behind the building, and after a suitable time, pull a string of buggies with stripped ingots for spotting in your rolling mill. Or you could have the stripper crane located in the same building as the steelmaking, although then you’d only be running stripped ingots, on the buggies, from steelmaking to rolling. This would save you buying moulds, though.[;)] By the way, most rail equipment used in steel plants, other than cars that are in the plant for loading with finished product for shipment to a customer (common carrier cars belonging to a railroad), are not equipped with brakes. In our plant, the locos had air brakes, but no air hoses to connect to the cars. Some ingot buggies also had couplers that were not standard height from the ground (we had two heights; one standard, and one lower, which necessitated an idler car with two couplers on one end). The idler, or “goat”, was a
The plastuct kits mentioned below would be a good aidea.
As for Walthers kits, as was mentioned below, you do not have to have the blast furnace. Therefore, you can leave out the coke oven, either. That leaves the electic furnace and the rolling mill. I post a thread entitled “steel mill”. If you use the forums search option at bottom of screne you can find it. My electric furnace are side-by-side which worrked okay in my situation.
Happy Model Railroading
I recalled seeing a picture of a stripper building in this Forum, so I did a search and came up with this:
Wayne
You’ll find some quick perspective from following these eBay bookmarks which I changed from N Scale to HO Scale. You’ll also find gondola rolling stock, perhaps cranes, and some other buildings in the mix…
“ho blast”
“ho cornerstone”
“ho mill”
Sean;
Try to find a copy of: “THE HISTORY OF MAKING AND MODELING STEEL” by DEAN FREYTAG. There is a copy on ebay now but at an exhorbinate price.
Also look for magazine article by Dean.
I beleive a lot of the HO steel mill kits from Walthers are retired. I know the blast furnace is. As stated John Gleeb at Peach Creek Shops has them. I model in N scale and have redesigned my mill to fit in an ared of 12’ X 3’. It is a fully integrated mill which now includes the new Electric furnace and Coke Plant. The mill has 40 buildings. The only thing that I am missing is the slag dump. I may add that at one end of the plant. I am laying rail for the plant now and will see how that works out.
thanks for the info everyone, its been really useful. that flat plastruct kit might just be what im looking for. Ill keep an eye out for one at my Local Hobby Shop.
You could build a mini-mill. They are the plants that use mostly scrap metal as a charge in an electric furnace. They usually use continuous casters now but an older plant would cast ingots. The best part about mini-mills is that the buildings are mostly corrogated metal boxes with large vents on top so they are easy to model. To break up the buildings’ plainess you could add a crane bubble to the roof or exterior craneway entrances. You could fit the basic operations on your shelf. There are only two major buildings, the electric furnace and the roling mill. Operations would be gons full of scrap for the electric furnace, ingot buggies with full molds to the stripper crane (which could be inside the furnace or the rolling mill or a separate structure. Stripped ingots on buggies to the rolling mill and the finished product out. Your finished product could be anyting from wire to beams to coils. Also ingot crop ends would be sent back to the furnace in gons. A mini mill would let you have a steel mill in little space and you would get to run those ingot buggies.