Blast Furnace Recent Photo

Got a new pic of most of the blast facility.

 

Dave

 

 

 

Dave your blast furnace is very amazing and looks very good!!! 

David,

That is the most amazing O scale display I have ever seen. Truly, a work of art.

Question. When you light the scene for photography, is it possible to bounce the light off of the ceiling or use diffused light? I ask that because your sky is excellent and diffused light or "bounced" light would extend the perceived distance between the vertical elements and the wall behind the furnace By reducing or eliminating the shadows.

Great model Dave.

We had kicked this around in the 6 pages.

Summary 

(1.)The facility is a blast furnace used to take Iron ore and reduce it to pig iron that is then moved to a BOF, Basic Oxygen Furnace to produce steel.

(2.) (3) large round tubes, left, are ovens used to preheat air that is forced into the large reactor vessel.

(3.) There is a trolley car system with (2) dump cars that charge, add raw material to the furnace at the top. Not visible in this picture.  Dave did a nice job of modeling the dump car system.

(4.) Large pipes at the top of the reactor vessel collect dust and dirt to a collection station left in picture.

(5.) Bottom of the vessel has a large air supply pipe, bustle pipe, that forces hot air into the furnace.  There would be a blower house, most likely lower right in Dave's picture.

(6.) Periodically molten iron is collected at the bottom of the furnace, via a tap. Small streams of liquid iron are channeled, using gravity, flat open area middle of picture, to lower level bottle cars or ladles to be moved to the final steel making vessel.

(7.) Final steel, requires another vessel/and building.  Molten iron is added to the vessel, an oxygen lance, source, is inserted in the top of the vessel.  Oxygen is forced into the molten steel. Basic purpose is to remove carbon from the steel.  At the same time, alloys are added to the mixture, nickel, chrome, molybdenum, etc. 

(8.)  Old method, contents of this vessel were then placed in ingot molds to solidify.

(9.)  Ingot mold steel was then processed in a (2) high roll mill to blooms or slabs after re-heating. Dave did a wonderful job on this roll mill. The Fort Pitt Highrailers have displayed the roll mill on their layout with Dave's help.

(10.)  Newer method, liquid contents of the vessel are added to another tall larger process plant called a continuous caster that eliminates a lot of waste and time. IMO a caster would be another relatively large modeling project.

 

Great modeling and a beautiful learning tool, Dave, Thanks for all the time you spent on this project.

 

Dave,

As the others have said, fantastic work! We have some truly skilled modelers here.

WOW that's nice!!!

Great Job! Who needs mountains? This Facility dominates the whole area, is functional, and makes the layout larger than life.

So are we running trains at your house this Friday?

 

I like it.

Not only a great model, also a most concise summary of this subject.  Mike if agreed by the management can we use your summary at the CSC.  We get questions on this subject from time to time on  our Shannon Steel Mill model.

 

Jack 

Very impressive!!!!

Outstanding, Dave!

 

Art

Great job and attention to detail. You have done an incredible job.

 

Dave,

 

I'm speechless, and for me that not easy, lol, you have done an amazing job with this model and the attention to detail in incredible.  Thank you for posting, seeing model railroading examples like these continue to inspire me.

 

Darren

 

Very nice! Including those switchers!

 

Some really great modelers on this forum!

Dave, this is incredible! Very cool and realistic!

 

WOW!  That is awesome!  Love it!

Very cool... now stop stealing all of my firemen!!!  

 

(BTW, I did find the figures somewhere else... I decided to see how they work before ordering the Arttista figures.  I will be calling them over the next few days - still need to more seated drivers...)

Sorry,   No mill dudes in silvers.  

Dave - fantastic work!  Very nicely done.  I think that's the best O scale blast furnace I've ever seen.

 

Mike CT - terrific summary

 

General point and question:  I've seen O scale construction worker figures (using jackhammers, shovels, etc.), but never seen any steel workers (directing crane, sitting in trucks, in silvers, walking as in changing shifts).  Has anyone seen any?

 

I've got a shift change to populate!

 

George

George,

 

I have been using Arttista firemen for cast house floor figures.  I cut down the hats and paint their coats silver.  Arttista also makes some nice construction workers with hard hats.

 

Dave 

Outstanding!

Dave,

 

Good idea about the firemen.  I do know about the Arttista construction workers with hardhats and have a few.  I was hoping for some other sources.  There was a company in Pittsburgh a few years back called Trainformations that would make custom sets of people, but I think they are out of business.

 

George

Fieldtrip.

 

 

Dave i knew you work wasn't that good as i don't see the shrub growing out the top like on the field trip pic you just posted. i think you need to start over and i'll be happy to pick up your 1st attempt and "throw it away for you". Seriously i am so jealous of your unbelievable craftsmanship on this piece, BETTER THAN MUSEUM QUALITY

Sweet job Dave!!

Gee, Dave, that 1:1 model you built outdoors is almost as good as the O gauge one you put on your layout.

Carrie Furnace is a great place to visit! I'll be going there for school in a few weeks, can't wait!

It takes a lot of guts and skill and talent to model industry, and modeling steel mills would seem to me, having lived in Duquesne, PA and worked at National Tube, US Steel, in McKeesport, PA, back in the 60's, an especially difficult challenge. You have captured the real thing. Dave, I'm so glad you decided to share your victory here with us. Congratulations, sir, on your success !

FrankM.

Well done, I bet it was a "BLAST" to build.

Don

Dave..i always told you that you were good at building things !! conrail john

Just have to say your eye for detail is uncanny.  Can't tell which one is the real deal? Well done!  My question begs to be asked, what's next?

My O scale furnace has a long way to go.  It is also a much more modern design that the Carrie furnace.  I almost wish I built a retro furnace after seeing the two in Rankin.

 

Being able to see the complex up close made me appreciate my heritage much more.  What a dangerous place this must have been to work.

 

Dave

 

Wow.  Great place and photos.  The air is a lot cleaner and the grass nearby a lo9t greener than in those I used to drive past in Pittsburgh four decades ago!

 

thanks!

In my younger days I had a boss that was a foreman in the 1950's Pittsburgh steel mill.

He worked nights....he often talked about how when the mill was running full capacity it was unearthly. It was like Mars......everything red brown.....fire and sparks. 

Kinda wish I could have seen it myself. My grandfather had a tailoring shop downtown Pittsburgh 1940-1952 how cool to visit him in that era of Pittsburgh. 

I would have liked to have seen it close up at night, too, but all I ever did was drive by on the highway and roads during the day, and unless it had just rained, it was always dusty, hazy, and gritty feeling.  Ugh.  But you need steel, and for a few decades at least, it provided some really good jobs. 

Dave,

Indeed, the mills were dangerous. For a few years during my career with the local telephone company in Baltimore I was stationed as part of an entire telephone crew at Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point, MD,  plant outside Baltimore. The Steel at Sparrows Point had over 30,000 employees at one point and was the world's largest single plant in terms of size. The last furnace, L furnace, was imploded a year or two ago.

 

One of our telephone company employees was walking on a roof that was partially glass that had been painted black during the war. Once he went on to the glass part he fell through to his demise.

 

My uncle was a Steel employee at Sparrows Point for his entire career- a mason who went in to replace brick in the furnaces. He said the policy for an employee who was killed working at the furnaces was to dip a ladle of molten iron from the cast and that is what was presented to the person's next of kin.

 

A tough, scary place to work but I am glad I spent some years there. If you get to the York TCA show again stop at the Sunset/GGD booth. I'd love to chat about the mills. Like you, I am building a steel plant on my layout

Bob Heil.

Dave:

 

Thanks for sharing.  Those Carrie Furnaces were very visible when crossing the Rankin Bridge on my way to work at Westinghouse in East Pittsburgh.  The furnaces were in full production back then.  I had a neighbor who worked there plus many other neighbors who worked in the USS Homestead Works.  And my father-in-law worked 47 years in the Open Hearth Furnaces at Homestead.

 

Yes, those mills were a dangerous place to work plus hot in the summer, cold in the winter and very dirty and noisy.  I personally knew one guy who lost his life at the Homestead Works.  I had summer jobs at Homestead, Duquesne and the Irvin Works while going to college.  When I got my degree I decided to get out of that environment and went to work for Westinghouse.

 

But as Lee said, those mills provided valuable employment for generations of thousands of families.

 

Bill  

There is a pretty cool 'cult classic' book out there called 'Out of This Furnace' that documents the daily lives of eastern European immigrants in the Mon Valley.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Out-This...merica/dp/0822952734

  

 

My great grandfather immigrated to the United States in 1907.  He worked for one of the railroads and was locked in a box car at night so he wouldn't run away before he ended up in the Kiski valley.

 

Life was extremely hard for him which is something I never forget.  It is definitely part of the reason I am so fascinated by the mills.

 

Keep in mind we still make steel here in the USA.  An abundance of scrap and the electric Arc furnace is less expensive than making pig iron from Iron Ore/Coke and limestone. Though electric arc/scrap metal has some issues, most related to impurities that are difficult to remove from the heat. 

 

I had done two courses in metallurgy, from Geneva College, here in Beaver Falls, PA, mid 1970's.  As part of the course we had done (2) field trips. Everything Dave has modeled was part of the first field trip to Midland, PA, Then Colt Industries/Crucible Steel. 

Even today, many years later, a very young farm kid, fresh out of college, was, open eyed impressed.   We were in control booth, one of the BOF, Basic Oxygen Furnaces, when a heat of pig iron was added to the vessel.  The operator lowered the oxygen lance and began the removal of carbon/ and adding alloys.  A lot of power, enough so, that the room we were in, shook. quite an exothermic reaction.  Fast forward to last summer I was working a job in Midland Pa, their new wealth, the Cyber School, which overlooks a lot of what is left of Crucible Steel. Sad, knowing what was there at one time.   There were also coke ovens on site.

 

Thanks again Dave, great adventure in the foggy parts of my aging mind.

Mike.    

Dave-good speaking with you for a few minutes on the phone today.  I'm glad you enjoyed your view from the top of Carrie furnace.  There used to be a "hot metal bridge" that ran from Carrie across the Mon to the Homestead plant.  There would be a train of submarine cars(hot metal cars) of molten steel brought to the Homestead plant for processing. The bridge used to be approximately where the east Waterfront bridge entrance is next to the blue Italian Marcegaglia steel co building is today.  Part of the Italian steel building used to be the old 140 inch mill spares building.

 

Bill-When I started working at the Homestead works in the early 70's,  there were 8,000-10,000 people working at the plant.  I worked in No 1 Machine Shop(there were 3 machine shops in the Homestead Works)which was part of Central Maintenance-we did the bulk of major repairs/rebuilding for all of the steelmaking equipment of US Steel's plants throughout the Mon Valley.  Our shop was nicknamed "The Big Shop"  As you said-it was hard work but there were good paying jobs for those who would work and by applying yourself,  individuals could work their way up the ladder through apprenticeships and experience.  Unfortunately many of these types of industrial jobs have gone by the wayside.  I started by sweeping the floors as a laborer and after moving up a little at a time,  got on the machinist apprenticeship,  and after 8,500 hours of school and on the job training,  I received my journeyman machinist papers in 1979.  My last day of work there,  I doubled out(worked 16 hrs) and then my foreman told me that was probably my last day(it was).  That was 1983.  Sorry to wander off topic-I could go on for hours.

 

Nick

I was born in Youngstown and worked on the narrow gauge at the Youngstown Sheet & Tube, Briar Hill Open Hearth. My uncle worked for P&LE used to deliver the molten iron from the blast furnace in the Campbell works. I used to visit with him in the caboose while he did his paperwork.

Digression is one of the best things about this forum! You learn as much from the digressions as the main topic. Also, it's important to keep talking about American manufacturing.

 

Some of the missing jobs are missing forever. Not because of overseas competition, but because almost everything you see has less parts in it that previous generations. Case in point: look at the hundreds of pieces of precision metalwork that went into making a typewriter (or worse a Teletype Machine). Now look inside a common Inkjet printer. There's nothing inside. There's a couple of steel rods, a stepper motor and a belt. A print head carrier that has a few parts. The ink cartridges have a few parts. Most of these parts are assembled by machine or robot. And then there's the circuit boards, again put together by automated machinery or robots. I'm sure that there were substantially more people making a teletype then a canon Inkjet printer.

 

The common wall thermostat used to have all sorts of mechanical pieces. Now, it's a just another circuit board and some I/O connections.

 

Everything is like this.

 

Carburetors. If anyone has ever disassembled Rochester Quadrate you know what mechanical objects they were. Now you have fuel injectors that are again, built on automated machines. Even when the jobs return (and some are), they're higher skill level that require significant man/machine interfacing skills. That's the dilemma. It's the low skill, manual labor jobs that have disappeared. How many men did it take to put in place one piece of steel rail. Now a bunch of machine operators and hydraulic techs put down miles of it a day. We need to expand the pie... more entrepreneurs and more skills training, and more companies making more things, not looking towards the old line businesses to start hiring more.

Nick,

 

I always enjoy our conversations!

 

Dave

A clean job, on one of the most dirtiest, dangerous places around.

 

I grew up on the south edge of Detroit. They made a little steel here too.

  Some mornings, ash and soot would be near 1/4" thick on your car.

 

 My Grandfather worked steel since the 30s. Got his ribs broken in strikes a few times, even left state for the pleasure, and worked the US Steel sheet mill mostly, by the time I was born. I've got his silver 3 finger mittens in with my torch gear. 

  He worked afternoons and I remember him coming home early, and in shock one night. His grey clothes dark, T shirt and neck, beet red from his partners blood. He was cut in half standing almost right next to him, by a coil of sheet metal unwinding.

 

Coils would occasionally fall off flats, or have bands break. While on semis too. The first two-three miles seem to be where it would happen most.

 With the "thunder" sometimes there is a whole lot of damage too. Cars, stores, telephone poles, etc.  

 My buddies dad also fell from a catwalk ladder that got bumped by a loader or truck as he was coming down. Broke his back, but he lived. Couple guys had arm burns, or were missing digits.

  The unfortunate stories are endless really. Dangerous. but it offered such opportunity

 The old USS plant still does a little production now and then. But its "Japanese", or "Russian" owned, and ownership bounces. Its been about six years now, but last I was nearby, the locomotive bells could still be heard every now and then.

   

Dave,

 

Have you seen my e-mail to you regarding the Steel Mill Modelers Meet?

 

Please shoot me an e-mail (in profile).

 

thanks,

 

George

George,

 

Yes I did.  Thank you for the info!

 

Dave

 

 

 

Starting to repaint and reshape the firemen.

 

Dave

 

 

Very nice work.

Dave it looks better every time. Really coming together.

Looks great.  Love it.  You do good work Dave.

Really nice work! That scene just sucks you in and begs you to look into every corner to make sure you don't miss some amazing detail.

David M,

    Very nice sir, very nice indeed!

PCRR/Dave

Keep at it Dave, great!!