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Hi to all.

Just joined this site as It is a source for a lot of o-scale info.

I had a layout assembled last year based on the Ashand HO scale blast furnace and

scaled it up to O-scale.  This turned out nice but this year I will install some lighting

and more figures and vehicles .

Which brings me to a few questions:

Where to purchase reasonable vehicles and workers that are found at blast furnaces?

Aso, I want to simulate molten iron coming down the chute to ladle cars.  I am testing LED's

and clear silicone sealer but the LED's show thru as a 'hot'spot and not diffused enough  Anyone

with info on a good way to simulate this?

I attach a few photos of my layout.

Thanks for any assistance.

Johnblast furnace-train [10)blast furnace-train [11)blast furnace-train [13)blast furnace-train [15)

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  • blast furnace-train (10)
  • blast furnace-train (11)
  • blast furnace-train (13)
  • blast furnace-train (15)
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I'd suggest very closely spaced LEDs and a diffusing translucent layer between the LED's and the clear silicon top layer.  I have done this on a smaller scale with flickering firebox installations, I use four or six flickering LED's behind a plain sheet of #20 white paper to diffuse the point of light.  I also sand off the front of the led's flat to further diffuse the point of light, another thing you can try.

There are some high density LED strips that have very closely spaced LED's that might work well in this application as well. Here's an example from my LED box...

If you want to get fancier, you could look into the individually addressable LED's so you could impart some motion to the stream of molten metal.

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  • mceclip0

@parrguy that's a heck of a mill you got there!

I will be very interested to see what you try here because I'm working on a layout that will feature blast furnaces. I also aim to animate tapping the furnace.

I planned on using individually addressable LED lights and something like hot glue to get the light diffused. The electroluminescent wire @Forty Rod suggested above looks very like they have potential but I don't know anything about them. I wanted to get individually addressable LEDs to be able to simulate the iron running along when the furnace is first tapped and the wire might not let me do that. We'll see. I'm still working on the structure at the moment anyway.

On the videos I've seen of blast furnaces,  the iron is one solid stream from tapping till the mud gun closes the hole.  Motion is imparted by the movement of pieces of Slag floating on top of the iron.  INMO if you want to mimic this movement,  use GRJ's  idea of  closely spaced LEDS  but couple them to some sort of  "chase lighting " module set at the slowest rate possible for effect. Something like is used on theater marquees.

BTW great looking blast furnace complex.

As for figures,  you can get any from number of makers suitable  construction workers but nobody makes steel mill specific figures.  I'm thinking of using firemen that are modified and painted to resemble someone wearing "silvers".

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OGR Publishing, Inc., 1310 Eastside Centre Ct, Suite 6, Mountain Home, AR 72653
800-980-OGRR (6477)
www.ogaugerr.com

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