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Thursday, March 11, 2021

Because You Asked

...or maybe you didn't, but if you ended up here looking for prototype information on the Cooling Tower that comes with the Suydam (or Ayres or Alpine or California Models) Union Ice Company, you're kinda sorta in luck.  After spending too much time scouring the inter-webs for that elusive image, this is the best I could come up with:

State Refrigeration Terminal, Embarcadero front and cooling tower. 1935.
Courtesy of UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library
 
Not bad.  1935 is only a few years off my late 20's era.  Wrong coast, but that's okay.  Not an exact match when it comes to the corners - that angled corner sure is neat but at this point there's no way I'm going to redo 8 baffle assemblies.  Still, it looks pretty good.
 
What really excites me about this image, however, beyond the 'squint analysis'* are the braces.  So much so that I ordered some Evergreen styrene channel and angle to get this feel on my tower.  Right click and open in a new tab to get a better close-up look.  At least I think they're channel iron braces.  That's what I'm going with. 

And it seems I was right to use wood for the baffles, although the texture I had may have too much contrast.  Weathering could tone that down or perhaps a dusting of gray through an airbrush to unify the colors of the wood.  At least the darker, wetter wood near the base of each baffle was a good call.

Here's where things stood this morning:

As of now, all eight baffles have been assembled.  That includes adding corner bracing to stiffen each assembly, applying wood image paper inside and out, and touching up the upper and lower edges with paint.  By the way, if you are building this kit, the gummed paper they provide to assemble the baffles works really well.  At least mine did - your mileage may vary depending on the age of your kit.

And that brings us to the first hitch in the git-a-long, the aforementioned channel irons.  As of this posting my styrene letters have arrived, the LEDs are somewhere between San Leandro and Ukiah, but now I'll have to wait on the styrene channel and angle before I can take this cooling tower any further.  That means I can start on the actual icing deck next, or wait until the LEDs arrive.

*Squint analysis was a technique I picked up long ago in a Bible Study workshop, then again in music analysis class, then again in Seminary!  No doubt it works in other fields as well.  To get the gist of a text's (or composition's) major structure, squint enough to blur the words (or notes) but still see the major groupings of things.  Some useful insights can be found using this technique.



4 comments:

  1. Squint analysis. I'll have to give that a try.

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  2. In case anyone is wondering, cooling towers are still used. Perhaps not for ice, since mechanical refrigeration can easily pull temps down enough to make ice, but the use of water cooled cooling towers is the way used to bring down air temps to pull off liquid gases or even freeze stuff like dry ice! Hard to believe that runing water at relatively high temps can actually pull temps well below 0 to get liquid oxygen, hydrogen or nitrogen. I don't know the temp of liquid oxygen or hydrogen, but liquid nitrogen is at -330 degrees f. I think dry ice is around -250 degrees f.

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  3. It said it was going to identify me in the above post, but I'm still anonymous. Russ Bellinis

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    1. Oh Russ, I'm not sure why Blogger doesn't like you, but don't despair. It may be best to just put your name in the text of the post itself and not worry about it. Regardless, thanks for commenting. Glad to know more about cooling towers!

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