Train_Steel_Mill

• Organizational links
• Rotary dumpers and conveyors move coal from mine to ship to train to steel mill down into mine
• Ships : transport cargo to-from the train cars.... Index page Ship
  [ship_coal] ,
  [ship_coal_Rotary] ,
  [ship_coal_Conveyor] ,
• HO Train Action - Interaction ....
  [THIS page : [Train_Steel_Mill] ,
  [rotary_dumper-Steel-mill] ,
  [rotary_dumper-Conveyor-Floodloader]
  and
  [rotary_dumper]
• Rolling stock action: Objects moved-positioned onto flatcars, into boxcars, into gondolas
  [Train_Rolling stock loading] ....
• Steel recycler crane unloads gondola train cars [Train_Steel recycler]
• Walthers Steel mill buildings : Building
• Coke oven has two ovens from two kits and the "Gas plant with washing tanks" to have someplace for the pipes to go :
• a rotary dumper dumping coal rotary_dumper-Steel-mill
• a coke pusher pushing coke out of the oven : To be built someday with a moving pushing rod and maybe self powered movement along the track.
• a guide car on the other side to guide the coke out and down into the quench car
• a quench car and its locomotive moving it into-under the quench tower and then on to dump it onto conveyors and final quenching. The conveyors move it under the high line into bins to be dumped into the Blast furnace.
• Blower house.... is Walthers Metro Power & Light with pipes going out of its side. Various sizes of Plastruct tubibg and joiners were needed to connect the incoming furnace waste air, outgoing high pressure air and the gas line to the blast furnace. More pipes were needed to connect the coke plant to the gas washing plant.
• Blast furnace.... dunno how much is to be done to animate 2 lanes of bottle cars switch into 1 to go into the EAF and BOF. The 3rd lane is for slag cars to go out to be dumped.
• Electric Arc furnace (EAF) - Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF) .... both have a lane for bottle cars and ladles to be lifted into the furnace. 2 lanes in front the outside is for incoming scrap steel and the other is for outgoing ladle cars. The EAF has ingot cars to go into the first door of the mill.
The BOF is scratch built with clear acrylic walls and roof to see everything. It has a movable crane to lift ladles up and dump into the furnace. The crane also lifts scrap buckets to dump into the furnace. Above the furnace is a tower that has the Oxygen lance and a bucket to dump sundry items that are not mass dumped in by the scrap bucket or ladle. There is a scrap sorting area next to the furnace and cars moving scrap around
• Rolling mill.... is extended by a 2nd mill kit and pretends to be a continuous rolling mill. The only door in the middle inputs ladle cars from the furnaces. There is a track outside the mill for the scrap steel to get around and a track on the other side for the bottle cars to get regrouped and sent bak to the beginning. There are two rollers thingys end to end going out to tracks and an area for just loading short steel plates. Plan to have a machine that rolls the sheet steel into rolls and thus can be loaded onto cars at the end of the rollers.
Dunno what will be removable to allow viewing to the inside of all this... Plan to have a servo machine to slide steel plates into a gondola... Maybe a static crane to lift rolls into cars from the roller machine.
• ....
• Steel mill cars
• Incoming material cars.... coal, iron ore, limestone, scrap steel
• Steel mill internal use cars.... bottle and slag cars
• Steel mill internal use locomotives :


Digitrax DN166PS and Power Extender operating 4 rotating beacons
[1] Bottle car mover : 2 RC SW1
[2] ladle car mover : 3 MVW SW1
[3] scrap steel mover : TBD

[4] car hidden - part of the coke pusher car
coke dumping panel mover non moving kit : Coke works guide and motor by Phillip's Foundry
quench car locomotive : NWSL 6'6 wheelbase power truck in a H0-scale Coker [failed at DCC, will be a DC locomotive]

[5] slag car mover : TBD

[6] outgoing coil car mover AKA a #7
[7...]locomotives to move stuff in the yard
• Outgoing product cars.... coil cars and flat car - gondolas filled with steel plates
• Animatronic - Robotic activity...
• Coil cars loading....
• Cranes transporting...
• Lights and Flames...
• You Tube videos...

• Rotary dumper is inserted along the coke ovens and thus squeezing the mainlines
rotary_dumper-Steel-mill

• Train_Steel_Mill: Built on 2'x4' slabs with the mainline running on both sides to make the 4' width from the 2' inner Steel mill.



Working front and back / Final front and back
• Coke oven is squeezed onto a 2'x4' slab. The images have it folded over and mine is the "typical arrangement" diagram version. Be advised the measurements are for the folded version and the extended version is over 4' in length, closer to 5' with the quench tower.
• Modified by combining two kits to make the ovens longer. As this made from many cut secions it is assembled on an acrylic 2'x4' sheet so the plastic could be glued together onto it. The acrylic is glued onto foam onto plywood. You know that transparent aluminum material. As the two sets were not made to be combined there needed to be support under the joining area across the coke oven. The 'concrete' ledge sides had to be extended lengthwise to enable the pusher and guide car to position correctly. This made the ladder repositioning difficult as the supports were no longer there.
• Coke oven.... has :
• the "Gas plant with washing tanks" to have someplace for the pipes to go. It has a track into the front door that raises and lowers and there are several LED lights inside along with people doing sundry things, the actual processing must be underground.
• a rotary dumper dumping coal rotary_dumper-Steel-mill
• a coke pusher pushing coke out of the oven : To be built someday with a moving pushing rod with the double track providing 9 and 6 volt power to the arduino and servo. In progress view is that brass cube on the back view.


• a guide car on the other side to guide the coke out and down into the quench car. "Coke works guide and motor" by Phillip's Foundry. Bought at INDUSTRIAL MODEL SHOP Burnside Productions. Look at the image and take care you do not put the access ladder on the wrong side - the hot side, like I did. It comes with explicit instructions including a 3D rendering for every step... and yet I messed it up. It is made from laser cut acylic and is a new adventure if you have never glued that material. me neither. Make sure somewhere along the line you get a squeeze bottle with a blunt syringe to place the liquid and a funnel or squeeze dropper to move the liquid from the can into the squeeze bottle. The stuff evaporates through the plastic so do the glueing and place the leftover back in the tin can.
• a quench car and its locomotive moving it into-under the quench tower. The locomotive was bought on Shapeways at : H0-scale Coker (RIGHT-hand version) Made by Ndustrial. Look carefully at the images so you do not buy the wrong version like I did. It worked out OK as the coke oven is two sets so there are two quench cars and I have one locomotive at each end facing in opposite directions : the hot mover and the return locomotive. I made one powered using a NWSL 6'6 wheelbase power truck as instructed on the website.
• ....


• Blower house.... is Walthers Metro Power & Light with pipes going out of its sides. The quench tower beside the Blower house on a 2'x4' slab.
• Power & Light / Blower Engine / Sintering Plant
• Power & Light
• It burns the Coke Gas from the Gas Plant after it is processed - the connecting pipe blows air to push the gas into the Gas plant to be procesed and then sucks it back to burn it for fuel.
• Blower Engine
• It takes in the hot air from the Blast furnace orange pipe and adds it to air that is forced out under pressure back into the Blast furnace in the blue pipe.
It also provides the natural gas in the yellow pipe to the Blast furnace which uses it to heat the air to extreme temperatures.
• Sintering Plant
• Cars collect the powder from the Blast furnace air processors, compress it and dump it out the other side into cars that take it to the Gas plant for further processing and then it disappears to be used as iron input to the Blast furnace.
• Jammed in with the quench tower on a 2'x4' slab. It has a track into the front door that raises and lowers and a pair going out from under the bins in the back. The incoming dust from the blast furnace is pressed and sintered and dumped into cars that take the sintered iron dust on into the Gas plant where it is further processed. The coke cars go under-through the quench tower to quench the coke- stop it from burning, and then go on to be dumped under the shed. Any remaining burning coke is hosed down and then the coke is conveyored on to under the high line where it is stored in bins to be lifted and dumped into the blast furnace.
• A Miller Engineering GE sign is mounted and there are several LED lights inside.
• Blast furnace on a 2'x4' slab with many rails...


• The high line extension and then the sloping embankment to go from ground to the high line with material containers underneath the extensions.... example of painting the railings


• Front side (dumping buckets not yet on the lift) Back side with piping changes visible
• Comments on the Walthers instructions:
• Step 9: Good luck as what fit snug before will no longer get close.
• Step 29 and 30: Do it their way - do not think it will be more difficult to slide the columns up after as the wall (6) has a lip that has to be where the the base joins.
• Step 37A : Brace 77 with wood or other support to allow pressing the stoves into place when glueing.
• Step 38: Amazing that the critical holes need to be drilled by the user and they are of no available drill size... good luck with that.
• Step 39A: You really only need to glue (127) to base (77) and the stoves (78) in place. The other pipes cannot move and not glueing makes for an easier and neater assembly.
• Step 39B : Position (132) to check position.
• ....
• The blast furnace piping made no sense to me so I modified the piping.
• Step 37: I cut off the lower stack to just above the joining to the 3 lower pipes and put a cap on it. I extended 105 and 106 using Plastruct tubing to be the high pressure air from the blower house.
• Step 48: I did not add parts 95 and 96 so the gas pipe was closed. At the other end of 97 and 98 I extended the gas pipe using Plastruct tubing to go to the blower house as the source of gas.
• Step 50: was extended to the blower house to be processed and reused as a warm start to the high pressure air.
• Step 52: Added a tube and an arm to simulate something that would allow positioning the dust dumping into a car.
• Step 53A: added 'water' pipes going from the base to the tops of the washer and precipitator. Added a tube to the bottom of the precipitator so all the slurry from the washer and precipitator could go somewhere.
• Painting all those railings... They actually assemble easily and correctly.
• Electric Arc furnace (EAF)


Walthers-HO-EAF inside wiring

Walthers-HO-EAF outside,
Walthers-HO-EAF inside
• The Walthers kit is on its own 2'x4'slab to allow the tracks to run slag cars out and back to before the coke ovens - where the slag dumping ground will be; and bottle cars to converge onto the correct track for the EAF and BOF.
• LED lighting to simulate Electric Arcing and not much else as the kit does not really allow much modification. Does not show visibly with standard LEDs, maybe of the 4 digit LEDs that provide more light would have worked. O well.
• .... http://led.linear1.org/led.wiz became gone and it is what I refer to for solutions.
  
  I use a 6 volt power supply and white :3 volt OR red: 2 volt leds mostly. All others are close to these
  Red, Orange Yellow: 2volt
  Green, Blue White : 3 volt Automatic color changing LEDs are also 3 volt AFAIK
  3 or 5 mm leds have one leg longer than the other. The long leg is the positive.
  go to http://led.linear1.org/wiz.php
  which is what is left of the final solution - it seems this is the beginning one and has not disappeared yet.
  I use it because it provides solutions of series and parallel hook ups combined.
  Series is when you connect the positive of one to the negative of the other.
  Parallel is when they are all linked to the positive on one side and negative on the other.
  On that page the little circle is positive and the bent down with multiple lines is the negative.
  
  Thus I can have lots of LEDs connected to 1 6 volt power supply.
  
  I make a bread board with the power supply input receptacle and pins to hook up the LED wires.
  I buy stuff from http://www.hansenhobbies.com/ as the prices are reasonable and the selection is great. You will need .100" Connector Housings 1x2 to do the + and - , Gold Female Terminals and then connecting pins if needed. I get wire from amazone unless i want servo wire which i get at Hansens.
  
  connecting pins: https://www.ebay.com/itm/100-Pcs-2mm-Pitch-Male-40-Pin-Single-Row-Gold-Plated-Long-Pin-Header-Strip-15mm-/181108670073?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2a2aeafe79
• Modifications
• Magnets and steel plates were added to the roof and front wall so they can be removed and easily repositioned.
• Walther heavy lift crane was added - static display only.
• Bob Forsythe Inland Steel #2 Charging Ladle with a pit dug underneath so it can sit down slanted to be filled by bottle cars. It is attached to the crane with fishing line 'cables'.
• Flatcars were modified with Green Stuff to make holders for the buckets used as scrap steel depositories. One is being lifted by the secondary crane mover.
• The incoming electricity hooks up to the outside wall from a 'pipe' in the ground (To avoid stringing string that becomes nasty with dust and gets knocked down by anything). Put a white picket fence around the pipe to keep people from getting fried by the static live electricity.
• After all was done the realization that the tracks from the furnace only need to collate into the one bottle car door as the other tracks become outgoing ladle cars and incoming scrap steel.
• The track switch machines are servos mounted on a Home Depot paint stick portion. They are not hooked up until a DCC system arrives and Kay Sievert's parts arrive and are soldered together. Kay's servo controler keeps the servos from jumping around when powered up - which would probably break the switch.
• On the left the ground rising to the high line is made from foam risers by Woodland Scenics on glued onto foam with Arlenes sticky glue. Half inch foam is more than and one inch foam is less than so both make for bad elevation changes. The risers were filled in with silicon and that was covered with caulk to allow painting with gray house paint to pretend all this is concrete.
• ....
• Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF) is on its own 2'x4'slab to allow the tracks to exit and switch. It would be after the EAF and before the Rolling mill so trackage would go straight in and the exiting track will have to allow scrap steel gondola track on the side of the rolling mill and all 3 tracks exiting the BOF to switch to get to their correct rolling mill opening.
• "Brendan Brosnan's BOF Vessel Construction Article" is a pdf on making a BOF from a Walthers water tank. It used to be at PeachCreek shops - but they are extinct. The following is my pictorial devolution.


• plastic lids, 3/4 inch dowel, wooden spool and a lot of amazing goop cement. The trunnion was placed between the two walls and the top rather than cutting one wall in half to effectively lower the trunnion.
• Smoothed out the trunnion with paintable silicon and covered with heavy paper, made wooden trunnion supports with a rotation guide hooked up to a full rotation servo powered motor-idler arm mounts (full rotation so it can tilt to accept stock, tilt to dump out steel, tilt upside down to dump out slag. Need a building to put it in... The Bordons cup looks about right to use as a ladle... the ones available at industrialmodelshop look mucho moreso realistic. As of 2018 the fullrotation servo went bonkers and uncontrollable so it has been replaced by a 90 degree servo the works fine except it can no longer rotate upside down to dump slag into an imaginary device.
• You Tube video....
• Building the BOF

• Scratch built building with plywood end walls and clear plexi side walls and roof
• Continuous rotation servos move the crane back and forth and side to side and up and down to lift and move the ladle or scrap bucket. A motor lifts the ladle or scrap bucket bottom to dump into the BOF. Power for the motor is through the wires that lift it. Many rails for all this to slide on.
• The CHARGING LADLE and SCRAP STEEL CHARGING BUCKET are made by Brandon Wehe and sold at INDUSTRIAL MODEL SHOP.
• The top houses the Oxygen lance and the dumping bucket for chemicals. They are connected to the outside by pipes. The hot air goes up and then down the big tube in the back of the BOF... where it goes from there is TBD.

Finsished and painted with a small exhaust tube rather than the tennis ball tube. Once the BOF was cut into a 2x4 sheet it became apparant the exhaust tube had to change and be on the other side so it would not interfere with the high line sloping embankment. Roof extensions were made to hide the crane sticking out of the building, although when seen from normal viewing height they do not hide much.




• Electronic

• Top ... Bottom
• Never place multiple servo pin connections in a row as they make it very difficult to connect the servos. Spacing them left and right is probably more doable than leaving space between them due to outgoing pin locations.
• Rolling mill
• Two kits used to make it twice as long so it becomes 64" long and thus on a 2'x8' slab.
• Need to make a short steel plate into gondola loader.
• The crane and all rolling things will be static.

• Steel mill cars

Incoming material cars: Coal, limestone, iron ore


Coal cars will be rotary dumped for the Coke plant. Limestone hoppers and Walthers 24' iron ore cars are delivered on the 2 tracks of the high line. Steel scrap in gondolas is delivered to the yard and transported in gondolas to the furnaces, going beside the high line next to the rolling mill and inside the EAF and BOF. No idea how the scarp gets to the Blast furnace, must be in the 24' bottom dump cars. Some big honkin trucks are to move limestone in containers to the EAF and BOF.




Steel mill internal use cars: not yet all detailed nor 'weathered'



Walthers Hot metal car kit with LEDs inside to make a sparling glow... You Tube video
Assembling a kit : make sure the trucks have the smooth on the top against the platform - Not the side with the 2 rails (they come apart - especially when changing the plastic wheels to Interrmountain metal wheels). The trunnions go so they are captured between the mount and the bottle. The one with the thin rail goes so it is on the outside of the mount - away from the bottle (see above for error of putting it inside the mount and it allows the trunnion to slide towards the bottle). The thick rail goes inside the mount-box so the cylinder stop can engage the trunnion. There is no-very little space where the trunnion goes into the bottle. As they are painted - they have a very tight fit, drop glue down on the trunnion from inside the bottle rather than trying to put glue on the trunnion and have it glue itself to the mounts. Drill out the wire mounting holes as they get congested when glueing the parts together.


Plastruct HO Scale Hot Metal Bottle Car Kit // Ryobi drill press and Dremel Moto saw
Left: Bottle Car Kit : Might be a while before this becomes 2 cars... there are not any wheels, trucks, couplers, nor sundry small parts included... there is a lot of plastic. The end result is supposed to look like the Walthers car. Instructions are the Dean Freytag article "Modeling a bottle car" from RMC November 1994. In twenty years the hobby has gone from being amazed at Plastruct assembing and selling Freytags' 'kit' to Walthers kits to Walthers RTR already assembled to ... ?Gold should be released soon as the RTR have been sold out for some time Platinum? ... we should be on by now ... DCC controlled lighting and motorized bottle turning.
Right: Ryobi drill press and Dremel Moto saw : ended up 'needing' these to accurately drill and cut the plastic.


2013 Simplified : Atlas super saw - razor saw and plastic cutting scissors. Bachmann depressed center flat car and plans for the 'skull' to make the opening 'correct'. The bottle was drilled wrong at first so the hole extends sideways instead of only perpendicular to the rotation axis. The parts are arranged from the cone, the part that is glued to it, the part glued inside that, [missing the wall to hold it in place], the white part gets glued into from both sides, the long tube is my 'trunnion'. It will go from the bottle mount and pass though a mid box retaining hole and rest inside and against the back wall of the box. All this should secure the bottle in place and allow rotation. Plan is to have a box on both ends, rather than one end having a visible trunion.


Traced-modified Walthers Mounts cut from the kits' 0.060 plastic. Not built quite to Freytag-Plastruct instructions. Assortment of bottle cars Clockwise from upper left : 2 Plastruct kits, 2 stock Walthers wo/w lights, 1 State Tool & Die, and below are 2 extended Walthers with lights. The white plastic 1.5" tube between them is an example of what was used to lengthen the Walthers kits... You Tube video



Several (glowing) HO Scale Hot Metal Bottle Car Kits [front to back: extended Walthers, stock Walthers, State Tool & Die] and things in the background (a 787 pretending to be a 737 and a glowing thing in a containment tube) {front right are some battery operated Christmas tree lights to go in a bottle car and some RC car 7.4 batteries - there for no reason}... You Tube video explanation of contents


State Tool & Die makes a lot of steel mill cars and objects to go in them (they come with Plastic wheels that need to be replaced with Intermountain metal wheels)


Basic 4-Truck Hot Metal/Bottle Car - Kit : Kadee #58 couplers - Plastic wheels (the top is not glued on so it can be pulled off and battery operated Christmas tree lights can be shoved in there)


Pollock 75-Ton Hot Metal Car - Kit : Kadee #58 couplers - Plastic wheels ; included are wires to make grab ons and tubing, even some small chain and hooks


3-in-1 Open Top Hot Metal Car - Kit -- With Extended Ladle & Add-On Wings : Kadee #58 couplers - Plastic wheels ; included are wires to make grab ons and tubing, even some small chain and hooks


All the wires and stuff on one and some on another - not painted so they are very visible

The bottle cars transport pig iron from the blast furnace to the Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF). The ladle cars transport from the BOF to the casting house where ingots are poured. Ingots are taken to the rolling mill.
Various Ingot cars, ingots, and a lot of other type cars used at a steel mill
Walthers Coke-Service High-Side Two-Bay Hopper : Hauling coke from the ovens to the blast furnaces is what these cars do best. Converted from older 36' two-bay hoppers, they feature side and end extensions. Since they are out of stock - there are similar hoppers made for pulp wood.


Walthers Slag car kits can be made rotatable by cutting off the stub on part 29 and Not gluing the gear into its drive mechanism (it helps to scrape off the mount and make that area smooth so it can rotate against it easily), nor onto the gear track - It is required to glue the gear into the ladle assembly. The other sides gear is already rotateable along its gear track as long as it is not glued. Good luck trying to get in there to cut the stub on a RTR car. So there will be some cars rotatable and some not so much.

These and many more things sold at industrialmodelshop which is a consolidation of individual makers.

Some links to HO Steel mill layouts and photos ... there are many more on the net ... and these may have become extinct...
B&O RR Steel mill Layout
Harrisburg Terminal Railroad : Steel mill Layout
Phil Baggley : PBNE : photos of real steel mill cars
mussersteelmill blog
prrndiv

And then there is this 56 page thread dating from 2005 to 2016 about Building a blast furnace from styrene by LVRALPH on Railroad Line Forums.

Dave Ayers site has much information and he suggests : Steel manufacturing forum as a new forum for those interested, especially in modeling steel mills.



Outgoing product cars:


Coil cars, it all depends on the type of mill ...

• Animatronic...
• Rolling mill....
• Pantilt moves steel plates from the roller into gondolas
• On hold until the shipment of nanobots arrives: Crane lifts and moves steel plates around.
• Blast furnace....
• Bottle cars are moved from here through the Electric and into the BOF and and through into a pause place.
• Lights and Flames...
• Electric furnace -
Static except for lights
• Basic Oxygen Furnace....
• Crane lifts and moves Ladles, metal shards bucket to be dumped into the BOF. Bottle cars are trained into and through and ladle cars move the finished steel out to the rolling mill.
• conveyor simulates lifting lime into the furnace this and the Oxygen lance are in a tall round tube protruding from the top of the building

• You Tube videos...
• Early BOF You Tube video
• HO scale train steel mill BOF 2018 3 6
• Walthers HO Coke oven 2018 3 29
• Walthers HO Coke oven 2018-4-30
• Power and Light Blower Engine Sintering Plant_2018_5_5
• Walthers HO Power and Light Blower Engine Sintering Plant_2018_5_11
• Walthers HO Blast Furnace 2018 5 13
• Walthers-HO-EAF_2018_5_28
• Walthers-HO-SW1_with Digitrax DN166PS & PX112-6F Power Extender_2018_7_9
• Walthers-HO-SW1_with Digitrax DN166PS & PX112-6F Power Extender_2018_7_19
HO scale BOF 2018Oct31
• ...
• ...