I am going to turn me a couple of cooling towers on my lathe for a nuclear power plant. What is the conversion for scaling an odject to o scale? A real cooling tower is between 400 and 500 feet tall what would that be in o scale?
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Simple enough since you said 0 Scale. 1/48, 1/4 inch per foot. 480 foot tower would be 10 feet tall.
A 400-foot tower would be 100 inches tall (1/4" = 1 foot). Those are going to be some tall towers, exceeding eight feet tall. You're going to need to do some selective compression. We had the same situation with a container ship model. They're s big you can't put a full-scale model on a train layout.
400'=100", or 8.5'. Hope you have high ceilings. 
Clint,
I constructed two cooling towers for a nuclear plant model. I made them about 15 inches tall and 12 inches in diameter. They were not close to actual scale. Most people do not have the room on a layout to make things to actual real-life sizes in scale. Look at your layout and come up with a size that fits. If you have a wall, you may even build a half-width cooling tower.
Alan Graziano
Well, if we can all agree that "O" scale is 1:48, then...
1/4 inch = 1 foot, and 12 inches (one foot) = 48 feet. Therefore, a 400' high tower would scale down to about 8.33 feet', and a 500' tower would scale down to about 10.42 feet.
I was a little slow in typing my response...your question has already been answered. Those are going to be some tall towers!!!
Alan that sounds like the dimension s I will use. Lol I wish I had a layout big enough to use the actual scale size. 10 feet, I would have to cut a hole in the ceiling...my wife would kill me!
Alan's solution sounds like a winner. Sometimes the prototype is just too big to work with. When we started making trees for the layout, we joked about making some giant redwoods. The tallest ones are close to 300 feet tall and about 15 feet across at the base. Six-foot model trees almost four inches in diameter on a model train layout -- a bit overpowering, but cool to imagine. Prototype bridges/viaducts are another one. A to-scale Hellgate Bridge (tower-to-tower) is close to 25 feet long in O scale. The "smaller" UP Santa Ana River viaduct out here would be almost 20 feet long (I have the drawings for this one, but got the thumbs down from the Secretary of the Interior).
Alan, would it be possible for you to post a picture of your nuclear plant?
Are you going to put smoke units in them to simulate steam ??
Clint,
I went through my computer and could not find a picture. I have a couple of snap shots. I will see if I can scan one and send it to you. It may take me a little time.
Alan Graziano
