Piping work continues... got the water lines installed to the cooling tower, finished the piping from the major platform, got most of the pipes to the distillation column in, piped in the big blue tank, and ran out of large size pipe elbows which is going to stall the project since the flare lines are going to be big pipe with some scratch-built manifolds.
Plastruct small diameter piping is frustrating. The elbows seem to be push fit and they do offer resistance when you insert the pin into the pipe, but then it falls apart. This makes pipe fitting very challenging since I don't want to CA the joints before I get the sizes measured. If you look at it the wrong way, the piping system falls apart and you spend lots of time putting it all back together until you reach the point where you can glue it all together.
First up was the cooling water piping. I laid out the position for the nozzles using a surface gauge, and then drilled parallel to the tank's axis so the nozzles would point straight out even though the tank end was domed. They were a bit loose and wanted to turn facing along the curve, so some medium CA froze them facing straight ahead. I still need to paint them.
Piping runs weren't too difficult except getting the water outlet fitted on the cooling tower bottom. It's pretty far back and I had to reach around a lot of complicated stuff to trial fit and measure. I didn't break anything.
Here are the two pipes fastened in place. I sprayed them Tamiya base metal rattle can in the shop before installation. I'm going to install a valve on the outlet line. The Plastruct valves snap over the pipe so I don't have to break the pipe to install. I have to paint the support posts concrete color.
For the remaining piping to the platform and distillation column I used the Plastruct scheme of running a long pipe across many racks using pipe T's to tap into them. This stabilized the run and made it a little easier to get it together... note that I said a "little easier". The falling-apart-piping was still happening. I did this both for the distillation column piping that went to the platform and the long run from the big blue tank.
And here is an overhead shot showing the current status. Should have piping done sometime next week and will start working on the ops building and the chain link fencing. There is still all the flare piping to run, and there's two more pipe stubs that don't have anything on them coming out of the sphere bottoms. Lastly, there's two lines running to the heater that has to be installed, and that would be that.
