The Cupola Building - Part III

Construction of the Cupola Building for my copper smelter module continues, with all the walls cut and ready for color application. I find that about fifteen minutes painting these stones is all I can stand in one sitting, so I am working on other projects in between painting sessions.

The Cupola Building - Part II

First thing this morning, I took the door frame that I built last night, fixed it to cardboard with a strip of double sided tape and took it out to the workshop to give it a shot of dark brown primer. (Since I have yet to build a spray both in my work area, I still have to do all my spraying outside.) Here we see the assembly back on the workbench after the primer had dried.

Here's a close-up of the finished head frame. It will receive some weathering and rust effects after it is installed in its home on the front of the finished building.

With that diversion taken and thoroughly enjoyed, I turned my attention to the Cupola Building walls. Taking the necessary dimensions from the plans I drew yesterday, I marked at the bench before taking another trip to the freezing workshop where I cut the walls on the band saw with a 1/8-inch 6 TPI blade, and gave them a quick edge sanding on the stationary belt sander before heading back into the warmth. Here we see the front elevation sections on the workbench ready for further processing.

  

 Next, I laid out the locations of the door and window openings and used a #80 drill in a pin vise to drill a hole at the coner of each opening to serve as a guide. I then took another quick run out to the workshop to cut out the three door openings on the band saw. In preparation for cutting the window openings, I drilled 3/8" hole with a spur bit in the drill press in the center of each of the window openings and then headed back inside.

The 3/8 holes I drilled served as an entry point for the hand operated sheet metal nibblers I used to cut the rough window openings. I find these nippers shown below, to be a much easier way to cut the openings than making numerous cuts with an Xacto blade or razor saw through the cats resin wall material.

After the openings were cut to slightly under size using the nibblers, I filed them to final size, test fitting each opening using one of the windows which will fit within them to be sure that they finished-out at the correct size. Below you will see the wall sections with the completed openings.

The last task for the day was to finish all edges by "carving" the stone patterns around the edges with a triangular diamond needle file so that the walls would have a more convincing appearance of three dimensional stone stone at all edges.

Bedtime!

First steps on the Cupola building

The reverberatorory furnaces were not sufficiently efficient to extract all the copper from the ore, with the resulting slag contained as much 18 percent .copper. In order to remove this copper, the slag was further refined in a second furnace more fitted for such work known as a cupola furnace. Not surprisingly, this second furnace was located in a structure known as the cupola building, shown here in a 1972 HABS photograph:

Using the  above photograph and some measurements I took at the Quincy Smelter about thirty years ago when I first considered modeling it,I created a set of scale plans from which to build the model, the front elevation of which is shown below.

Rather than jumping into the job of wall construction, which I expected would take three or four days, I decided to take a little side trip before calling it a day. Referring to the HABS photo above, you will see the central door into the elevator was outfitted with a door which opened vertically with the aid of a counterweight which can be seen hanging to the right of the door track. It was this little detail which decided to recre first.

I first looked through my parts stash for something which could serve to replicate the two pulleys on the head frame of the door track. Coming up empty-handed, I decided to scratch build the two pulleys using 1/8" and 1/16" disks cut from sheet styrene using hole punches, shown below along with the scrap styrene from which they were cut and a razor blade to provide some sense of scale.

Gluing the pulleys together was somewhat of a pain. First,  a 1/8" disks was placed on the work surface. One of the 1/16" disks was then picked up by lightly spearing it on the center of one side with the sharp point of the Xacto knife, a drop of solvent applied to its back side and then the smaller disk carefully placed at the center of the larger disk and held in place until the solvent set, as shown below. A second 1/16" disk was then added, and finally a second 1/8" disk applied atop the stack, building up the pulleys.

With the pulleys fabricated, I then set about building the upper framework to house them, using some extremely small nul/bolt/washer moldings to indicate the bearing centers for the pulleys and the points at which the head frame was bolted to the vertical slides. Here we see the completed front half of this upper head frame along with a penny to give an idea of scale. After finishing the rest of the framwwork, I realized it was late, and I headed for bed.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas Day. We have a guest coming over for dinner and some adult beverages this evening, but that didn't stop me from putting some time in at the bench before I had to break to help clean the house and prepare dinner! The first thing I did was to put a roof on the boiler house ...

 .. and added a few of my sequin and pin light fixtures.

Now, I must quit to get ready for our guest, but I expect to put in a couple more hours before the day is done..

Back to normal

My new work area is taking on an appearance of "normalcy" with three structures under construction on the bench.this morning.

Today, I was working on the boiler house for my copper smelter. This is my first attempt at modeling a a cast concrete structure, and I am trying a printed texture that I downloaded from Scalescenes sna printed on my inkjet printer.

The stack came from Walthers and is injection molded with a brick pattern on the outside. I sanded off most of the brick finish, and wrapped the stack with the same concrete paper as the structure. While I think the stack came out looking pretty good, I do not like the top. It appears somewhow unfinished. I will give it some thought and see if I can come up with a more visually appealing way to cap it.

Ater posting a message on the HOn30, OO9, and HOe Modelers page on Facebook and receiving some excellent suggestions, I decided to wrap the top of the stack with two multiple bands of the concrete paper - the first wrap being a scale 15" in width and the second 9" in order to obtain the "step." I think it is a vast improvement over the plain top. I will give the top a fog of flat black with the airbrush to simulate sooting when I weather the complete structure.

 

 I also picked up on the mineral building, gluing the for walls together. If I can muster any time at the workbench tomorrow, I plan on beginning construction of the for this building.

Here's the almost finished structure, short of final detailing and weathering.

The new work area

I finally got everything moved and organized, and I am looking forward to some productivity over the coming 10 day hiatus!

Somewhere for all that paint

With the move indoors, I figured it was time to find somewhere to put all of those small containers of craft paint I usually have lying around in boxes and drawers. So, I ordered this 48 jar rack rack over the weekend and it arrived in today's mail. This should be an improvement!

Its getting cold - time to move operations indoors.

Up until this point, I have been doing all my modeling in my wood shop. However, with winter finally spreading its grip across northern Michigan and the temperatures plummeting, its time to move operations into the house because it is going to get too expensive to keep the shop warm enough.. If Amazon's shipping status is correct, FedEx should be delivering a pair of these five-drawer artists tabourets tomorrow, which will serve as the base for a new modeling workbench. The ten drawers should provide me with a significant amount of storage space for parts and supplies.

After work this evening, I made the trip to Lows and purchased a 30" slab door to serve as the work surface which will sit on these bases. Tonight, I added a wood edge around the door, routed a comfortable radius at the edge, and gave it a coat of polyurethane. A second coat in the morning and it should be ready to fit on the bases.

I will probably have to build a couple of boxes to place underneath the cabinets to raise the working surface to a comfortable height. While at Lowes, I also bought some brackets to support the copper smelter module on the wall. The Empire begins!

The mineral house has four walls.

I finished painting the final wall of the mineral house tonight. Can't go too much further on this one until the slate roofing material arrives, but its not like I don't have plenty more to work on!

Unconventinal lighting

All the buildings around the copper smelter are going to need exterior lights. This means I am need to come up with around 50 lighting fixtures! A couple of weeks ago I did some digging online to see what was available, and was stunned to see that I was going to have to shell out around $1.00 a piece for them. 

I put on my thinking cap and while I was at WalMart last weekend. I purchased a package of 250 ball head .05mm pins and a bag of 800 cupped 5mm sequins, with the thought that they might be cobbled together to serve the purpose. Tonight, I made the prototype run shown below:

The pins were bent using needle-nosed pliers and the “electrical boxes” were cut from sheet styrene with a single 1/8” hole punch and drilled with the pin vise. I just need to go easier on the epoxy holding the sequin shades in place when I make a “production run.” for which I will fabricate a fixture to obtain uniformity throughout a run. With a total investment of $6.00, I have enough supplies on hand to build 250 light fixtures. While the "rivet counters" might complain that they are over sized, at less than two cents apiece plus a little labor, they are close enough for this guy!

To a man with only a hammer ...

It was said by one far wiser than I that "a man with only a hammer considers all problems to be nails." Over the years I have built up fair stock of power tools in my wood shop, and I frequently find myself approaching  disparate problems from the perspective of the equipment in my shop - even when building HO scale models. Here's a perfect example of my being stuck in the furniture making paradigm.

The prototype mineral house in the copper smelter which is serving as the inspiration for my structure was outfitted built with a circular window in one of its gable ends. Since the building was of sandstone, a circle of stones was installed to trim-out the window, as shown in this HABS drawing:

In order to replicate the installation, I decided to cut the ring of finish stones from sheet styrene.  While the conventional method would likely be to carefully cut the inner and outer sides using a sharp Xacto knife, my power tool paradigm led me down a very different path.

In woodworking, I bore holes using a drill bit. When drilling larger holes, I use a smooth cutting, sharp forstner bit, of which I have a complete set - one of which was the exact size needed to cut the center opening. Placing the bit in the drill press and the styrene up against the fence, the forstner made quick work of drilling the hole through the thin styrene - its sharp cutting edge creating the beautiful shaving in the process as shown below.

I usually cut circles in thin wood using a jig on the band saw - so why not styrene? Grabbing a piece of scrap 1/2" plywood, I used the same forstner bit to drill a hole near the edge of the ply. Digging through my jig making supplies, I was elated to find a delrin rod that was exactly the same diameter ad the hole, so I cut off a short section long enough that it stood proud of the top of the ply. I set up an 1/8" blade in the bandsaw and clamped the piece of plywood to the saw table so that the outer surface of the delrin rod was the desired distance from the blade. After angle cutting the piece of styrene so it would fit on the mandrel with its edge against the blade, I turned on the bandsaw and carfully rotated the styrene, cutting the desired ring in the process.

After cleaning up the slight burrs with an Xacto knife and 600 grit sandpaper, I glued it with epoxy to the prepared wall - the circular opening in which I also cut using the forstner bit!

Perhaps a little unconventional, but it worked like a charm!

Replicating Jacobsville sandstone

The mineral house I am fabricating was one of a number of buildings in the complex which is serving as inspiration for the copper smelter I am building, was built of type of native stone known as Jacobsville sandstone. This stone can be found all along the south shore of Lake Superior from the Keweenaw Peninsula west to the Apostle Islands and north across the big lake to Isle Royale. Varying in coloration from a light salmon pink to dark red with striations of vanilla, it was a very popular building material in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Shipped throughout the country, New York's famous Waldorf Astoria hotel was perhaps the most famous structure built from the stone until it fell out of favor as limestone gained in popularity. While not of the mineral house itself, the photo below serves as a good example of this particular variety of sandstone.

I burned the midnight oil last night figuring out how to fabricate walls to replicate this specific stone. Digging through my material stash, I found a single sheet of molded styrene that I picked up earlier this year in a "scratchbuilder's lot" on EBay. As seen in the very poor quality photo below, some of the stones stood unrealistically proud and were very "globular," so I went at them with a file and sandpaper. Once I got them where I wanted them, I built a mold and cast a resin trial wall section. Feeling the result could work, I began constructing a prototype sidewall. The window openings were made by drilling, opening up with a hand-operated sheet metal nibbler and then filing to final size. I then carved the edges so the stones continues around the corners. Sills and lintels were cut from styrene with the lintels made as circles with the inner radii cut on the drill press with a forstner bit and the outer radii cut on the band saw using a cobbled-up circle jig. Finally, before turning-in I epoxied everything together and gave it a shot of primer.

This evening after arriving home from work, I spent almost three hours painted everything. (Thank God for downloadable audio books!)  I feel good enough about the end result shown below that I will begin work on the remaining three walls this coming weekend. The prototype for this particular structure had a slate roof. Hopefully the laser cut roof strips that I ordered yesterday will be here in time!

 

Here's a photo of the virtually completed structure with the exception of  detailing and weathering. I feel the effect replicates the prototype pretty well and comes close to justifying the effort that went into creating the castings.

Finishing-up the briquetting plant

Work continued today on the briquetting plant for my copper smelter module.  I am ready for the arrival of an order of styrene C-channel and I-beam to begin construction of the 18" trestle which connected the doors on the upper floor to the adjacent cupola furnace.

There 1ill be 18" gauge push car tracks going into the two large doors on the lower level of the building through which fine copper ore was delivered to the building for briquetting. Briquettes were then taken out of the building by way of the two doors on the upper floor by way of another 18" push car system which crossed a trestle into the cupola furnace building, which was located adjacent to the left.

The strange contraption protruding from the building to the right housed yet another 18" gauge push car line which brought minerals used in the briquetting process from the mineral house to which it connected.

All in all it's just ....

I thought that documenting the process I am using on the walls of the briquetting plant for my copper smelter module in the event that somebody might find the process of use in their own modeling. The following series of photos shows the process step-by-step. Comments on the contents appear immediately below each of the photos.......

The structure of each of the walls is built-up of two two layers of 050” Crescent mounting board glued together with Mod Podge matte medium. I place the two glued sheets between a couple of sheets of Masonite with about a half dozen clamps spread all around until the mat medium dries – about a half hour. I then remove the wall lamination from the press and glue the pattern for the blocks on the front face. This new lamination is then returned to the Masonite clamping setup for another half hour, or so.

Here, the triple lamination of Crescent Board and printed card has been removed from the Masonite press and I have carefully measured and drawn the cut lines around all four sides of the wall.

Next, the openings for the doors and windows are carefully laid out. I try to place all doors and windows so that as many of the cut lines will occur on the natural edges of the blocks. Having the printed template applied to the wall really helps with this task.

Here the windows and doors have been cut out. It is acceptable to "overshoot" the corners a little, since the kerf will be covered by blocks. I use a good old #11 blade in a Fiskars handle.The left side of the handle as seen above, is flat, and provides a good, solid and comfortable surface against which to apply the necessary pressure with my index finger to cut through the two layers of Crescent board. I find it usually takes five, firm passes with the knife to cut all the way through.

Here I am laying out the cut lines for the lintels on the same matte inkjet photo paper which I use for printing the wall templates and the blocks themselves.

Here the door lintel and three smaller widow lintels have been cut. They will be glued onto the piece of card shown between them. The three pieces of card below will be laminated together to create the correct thickness for the window sills.

At the top, the three pieces of mat photo paper have been glued and a 1-2-3 block placed atop them to apply pressure until the glue dries. The four outer lintel laminations have been glued to the backer sheet and await final cutting.

The four lintels and three window sills have all been cut and are ready to install.

The lintels and sills are glued in place on the wall.

I then cut the sheet of photo paper which has been printed with the pattern for the blocks into horizontal strips using a stainless rule as a guide.

The strips are cut into individual blocks by eye using the #11 blade. This is an easy task since the pattern has a crisp printed line where each cut needs to be. Partial blocks are cut by eye as needed, cutting halfway between the printed lines.

To be continued .....

Another birck in the wall

I managed to make a little more headway on both the walls of the briquetting plant and the mineral house house for my copper smelter module this weekend.

There are now three completed walls for the briquetting plant. The strange "peaked blob" at the upper end of the end wall on the right is the mounting for an enclosed overhead way which will connect to the adjacent limestone house.

Front 3/4 view of the mineral house.

Rear 3/4 view of the mineral house. The vertical red sheathed structure is the housing for a bucket conveyor which brought crushed ore up into the bins. This structure will be located tight against a 30" spur. Hoppers will discharge ore into a pit beneath the rails which will then be picked up by the conveyor.

Close-up of the front of the mineral building showing the chutes down which the crushed ore was loaded into 18" gauge manually pushed cars for transport to the furnace.