Last updated on: Sep 10 2010

2010 Steel Mill Modeler’s Meet Report

This year’s meet was held at the Turf Valley Hotel in Ellicott City, MD, Sept 3-5 and was the largest meet (by far) that we have ever held. A total of 82 people showed up for the event and as they say,”A good time was had by all.”

The focus of the SMMM is to foster better knowledge of steel mills and how to translate that into building better models. I don’t think I am being overbold when I say that we have succeeded. The quality of the presentations (we call them seminars) was professional throughout. As you can see we had a lecture theater and the room was comfortable and the acoustics excellent. A total of twelve seminars covered everything from how to do research: to modeling techniques: to examples of build models. A CD with all of the PowerPoint presentations was given to each attendee. If you did not pick up your disk at the meet I will send it to you for $5.00. The post office scalps shippers of CD’s. It seems it is an odd size and requires special handling.

The display room was filled with excellent models. I never know how much space to reserve for this function, and we had enough space, just. It was full of eye candy. There were freight cars, locomotives, rolling mills, blast furnaces, Huletts, soaking pits, electric furnaces, BOFs, and much more.

People were setting up here on Thursday afternoon. It looks like there is a lot of empty table space. By Friday AM we were struggling to find enough space!

Richard Knappen drove down from Quebec with this in the back seat of his car.

Now that you have seen the photos I’ll let you in on a little secret. It’s N Scale! A fully detailed melt shop with three highly detailed tilting electric furnaces. The quality of the workmanship and the completeness of the model were superior. It should come as no surprise that this was the 2010 winner of the Dean Freytag Award.

Jim Dipaola presented a seminar and brought his reworked Basic Oxygen Furnace. A couple of years ago Jim had a great start on a BOF, didn’t like it and did a major rebuilt! Jim’s work is a fine example of just how important it is to keep things straight and square.

Glenn Sonnier just can’t stop building blast furnaces. Last year he came in with a beautiful model built from Mike Rabbitt’s plans and won the Dean Freytag Award. Well this year he built another earlier type blast furnace from another set of Mike Rabbitt’s plans. Good clean work.

I met Dave Alley at the NMRA convention in Milwaukee where he showed me a few photos of his completely scratch built S Scale blast furnace. Dave has been described as an “Out-of-the Box” thinker, and I think you could say that he can’t SEE the box from his position. He turned the blast furnace from laminated plywood. His buildings are made of plywood, and all of his piping is copper tubing. The kind of tubing you can buy at Home Depot. Now everyone knows that this won’t work.. The problem is that the elbows have a larger diameter than the pipe. The pipe slips into the elbow so that it can be soldered. Unfortunately that makes for a strange looking topworks. The solution? Overlay the tubing with the little connection sleeves! It looks really good! We also asked him when the Espressos would be ready.

Pete Slugg presented an excellent seminar on the history of Huletts and how to construct the Walthers model. He punctuated this by displaying four of these beautiful models.

Jim Musser showed up with this beautiful model of a pig caster. Take a look at his blog for better pictures and his impression of the meet http://mussersteelmill.blogspot.com .

On Saturday evening we had our traditional “Mill Hunkie” banquet for 80 people. John Gallagher, the man standing, is our new Mill Hunkie Dinner Advisor. (MHDA) Coming from Pittsburgh, he has outstanding credentials and is about to graciously accept this new position, that of being the advisor to hotel chefs wherever we hold the SMMM.

About 25-30% of our attendees at every meet are “First-Timers”. This is good. Its really nice to see that we are interesting new folks. Some of the first times seemed a bit overwhelmed, mostly by their unfamiliarity with the terminology. Terms like, “soaking pit”, can’t be understood without some explanation, so we’ve decided to provide a simple glossary of steel mill related terms for all attendees in the future registration information.

If all goes well, we will be back at the same location next year at the same time. Oh well... That means I have to get to work on my coke ovens... I’ve got a couple of ideas for lighting and smoke...

This whole thing wouldn’t work without the outstanding participation of all the folks who presented seminars, brought models for display or had their layouts open. I can’t thank you enough.

 

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