Supporting Equipment for Blast Furnace

Allow me to make a few suggestions.  First, search the forum for posts by ROO (I think his full name is Neville Rossiter) who built an American style O-scale layout based on a US steel mill operation down in Australia.  Second, search for early steel operation photos and drawings through the Library of Congress (lots of info available there).  Third, search for and read a magazine called "The Mill."  It's not real "thick" with content and its only been around a few years, but you might find some useful info.  Here is the link to the magazine:

https://steelindustray.blogspo...s-available-for.html

Chuck

Roo, got it. I'll see what I can find.

Gah! The Library of Congress! I use it a lot for Sanborn Maps when I'm looking into history in my hometown but I never thought to use it for pictures! I've been on Ohio Memory, Hagley, and an archive out of Pittsburgh. I'll have to see what the Library of Congress has.

Never heard of The Mill. I will look take a look for sure. Thank you so much for the leads!

Billy,

For a blast furnace, you would require some stoves( cylindrical tall domed roof tanks ), a dust collector vessel, a gas dryer vessel, and a burn off stack at a minimum.

if you build an electric furnace, most of the equipment would be inside a large building.

if you can find a book on steel mill modeling written by Dean Freytag, you will get a much better understanding.

@PRR1950 The Mill sure is handy! Full of really inspiring and useful pictures!

@Alan Graziano So far I have everything you named. I did skip the ore crane but I have the skip hoist. That's prototypical for two furnaces that existed after 1900 in Youngstown. I would have hated working there haha But I have the open hearth in place of the BOF and an electric arc furnace right now. I've been massaging my track plan and an arc furnace is now on the table because I opened up some real estate. It would generate some scrap loads on the railroad!

There's also Kempinski's "Model Railroader's Guide to Steel Mills" as a possible reference.

I think I have that @PRRrat. I used it to get some of the building dimensions and picking out which pieces of equipment I wanted to include. It's a great book!

Bill, OH boy, ask and you shall receive!

For starters get Dean Freytag's "The history making and modeling of steel ", and his "Cyclopedia of Industrial Modeling".  Both excellent resources. I also recommend "Steel Giants,  historic images from the Calumet Regional Archives", pictures and stories about building the mills in Gary Indiana.

On the personal side," Rust " by Eliese Colette Goldbach and "The Heat-Steel worker Lives & Legends" from Cedar Hill Publications give multiple stories about life in the mills.

My go-to site is GOOGLE'S free book and magazines. I've found trade articles and treatises written back in the early part of the 20th century regarding the construction of all parts of the mills including blast furnaces,  open hearth and electric arc furnaces.  Rolling mills and ancillary buildings are discussed.  Much of it is technical in nature but there are a lot of drawings and maps that can be found.  Also the advertising gives a lot of information pertaining to machinery and parts needed.

Good luck.

Thank you so much @third rail!! I will get on it here and start tracking those sources down. I did make some progress on lunch today and found some handy diagrams and whatnot about steam powered blowing engines. So that's a start. I still need photos to figure out how things were oriented in the shop! There should be enough sources in this thread that I can find something. I do know there is a blowing engine down in Pittsburgh, PA. That's my back up plan haha It would be a bit over an hour drive for me and I found they'll want me climbing around on it taking measurements and whatnot.

I try to find the journal "BLAST FURNACE AND STEEL PLANT " , it came out of Pittsburgh and contains several months of issues in one site. Huge amounts of information on the steel industry from mining to finished product selling.  Based on the size of the blast furnace you're building,  these journals will help you decide how large the stoves need to be and how big of a blower house is needed.

Plus they're just interesting to read. Tells us just how much knowledge people had over a hundred years ago calculating computations with just a slide rule.

I'll see what I can find @third rail. I should have plenty of reading to keep me busy while I wait for the ceiling paint to dry haha I did find some important pictures on lunch yesterday at work. They're of the blowing engine and boiler houses. I zoomed in and found a guy on the staircase. This really put the scale into view. I hope I have enough space for these structures!