A couple of hours work on the flare. I got the platforms roughed out and fitted the ladders. The total height is 23.5" high so it's approaching 100 scale feet. Big for my layout, but puny in real life.
I shot myself in the foot wiring-wise when I filled the lower chamber with lead shot and then glued it all together with CA. It was an idea to add more weight to the bottom and help stabilize it since it's so top heavy. But... it now means that I can't run the light wiring out of the bottom. If I attempt to run the wires out the side it'll make fishing the wires much more difficult.
I made the platforms out of very thin stuff and put on a double edge of 0.020" Evergreen stock. It's springy so I had to coax it around and use both solvent and CA to get it to stay there.
Underneath I added the triangular braces that support it on the column. The column in this case is CPVC potable water pipe and is impervious to standard solvent cement so I'll secure everything with CA. I have put the capping on that I did on the distillation tower and will do that tomorrow. I ordered styrene railing and will permanently install the platforms when the railings are installed... next week.
I only had 6 Plastruct ladder supports left so I used four on the lower ladder and 2 on the upper. There's really nothing that's going to disturb the ladders once it's on the layout. I put a mid platform halfway up the tower, but frankly don't know how far up the ladder should go before there's a rest platform. I'm sure someone out there knows this fact and could share it with me.
There's a sneaky way that I can run the wires from the warning lights at the top. I have to run a couple of pipes from the bottom to the top, one for 'steam' and one for 'pilot gas' to the pilot light. I can't get both conductors down one Plastruct #4 pipe, but I can get the positive down one and the negative down the other. I have no more Plastruct pipe hangers so I'll have to scratch build some. I can us some brass tubing with a 1/8" i.d. and a piece of brass rod soldered to it. It will take some time, but so will ordering them via Internet and waiting a week till they arrive.
