Cooling Tower Tank?

Yep.  I'm adding a tank to the ice factory adjacent to the cooling tower.  Oh, and that's moved as well.  I never was happy with it on top of the main building so I am building a structure on which it will rest.  Pipes will run from the main building to the tower/tank grouping.  Here is the inspiration:

There is a wealth of detail in these photos but I will need to be judicious with how much I include on the model if I want to get it done sooner rather than later.  I'm shooting for the flavor of the place, not a scale replica.  Thankfully there are many different examples to choose from so I can mix and match as I see fit.

In the mean time since the last post I have trimmed down the Tichy tilting windows to be closer in size to the openings in the office walls.  Next I'll need to trim the walls to fit the windows exactly.  Still need to install the interior details.  Heck, I still need to make an interior wall!  The one that came with the kit was too small.  Really not sure how either I messed up my dimensions or they cut it too short.  Doesn't matter as I still need to make a replacement.

I also purchased a piece of PVC sheet to use for the diorama base.  I decided a while back it'd be easier to gather together all the pieces on one surface instead of trying to glue them to each other.  I'll need to be careful with the wiring, however, as there won't be a significant void beneath the base in which they can nest until it is installed in the scene.

Cooling Tower Progress

Here's an update on the latest work to detail the cooling tower for the Suydam Union Ice Company.  A couple weeks back I received the angles and channels for the bracing, but focused instead on the interior office details, wall and roof bracing, and building the icing platform.  I also applied a first coat of stucco/paint to the building except the front wall.  In addition, I cut out the letters for the front wall sign.

Before I can finish the front wall I need to finish the cooling tower, in order to get a feel for how the lights will look along the wall beneath the tower.  Having done most of what I could except work on the tower, I returned to that focus.  I set up the NWSL chopper to cut 3/4" lengths of the styrene channel, and 7/8" lengths of the styrene angle for the corners.  Next I attached the strips to a painting stick, along with the styrene letters on a separate stick.  The letters got a coat of black, and the channels and angles a coat of primer gray.

The gray parts will be painted with a blotchy light gray to try and approximate the look of galvanized metal before I glue them to the cooling baffles.  I also found another picture of a prototype much similar to the one in the Suydam kit.  I decided to hunt for the prototype that Ayres used - a fact they touted in their catalog - and turned up a few more cooling towers in California.  Here's one from just down the road in Santa Rosa:

Ain't she a beauty?  Of course this tower has got a fancy roof with lovely trusses, but the baffles are the same shape as the kit.  I'd love to see more sides of this structure, and the detailing is really interesting.  And how about that sign behind the pole?  This Means YOU!  Opens more possibilities for my own structure, though I am having to control project creep and balance that tension with letting the creation speak through the process of building.

Work has been slow going lately, with in-laws visiting, Easter celebrations, a spouse that likely got food poisoning, and splitting a bee hive.  But each night I sit at the bench and do something to move the project forward, no matter how small.  Sounds simple, but right now I find this an effective means of getting something done when living through lockdown as an introvert with a family tends to drain the energy out of me.

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

http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf0v19n9mx/?order=1

 

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.