Modeling the Hill City grain elevator: Pt. I
These photos show the equipment beam assembly prior to installation (above) and installed in the top of the head house (right). Partially visible below the equip- ment beam are the pipes leading from the distributor.
To accommodate different
sized wagons and trucks, the floor of the dump house (below) had two grates.
abled a man to raise or lower himself using a rope that joined the manlift to the top of the structure that guided its travel. The small spring is a Kadee coupler spring, the rope pull is nylon thread, the cable is fine brass wire, and the pulley is by Western Scale Models. The wheat cleaner and Buffalo Ex- Fan,
haust Richardson Automatic
Shipping Scale with support and gar- ner, Hall distributor (also called a “ger- ber” after the namesake company that also made distributors and other eleva- tor equipment), and the head at the top of each leg were built from dimensions noted with field sketches and by study- ing photographs. This equipment is in- stalled on the top floor of the head house along with the equipment beam assembly.
A rod protruding through the floor connects the crank on the first floor to the distributor via a coupling mounted on a short section of a wooden chute, which is the lower portion of the return chute that sends grain which has fall- en into the bottom of the distributor back to the leg.
The grain might have been cleaned as it was elevated, as reported in the Camas County Courier issue of August 23, 1923, or prior to shipping, as illus- trated in a diagram from Grain Eleva- tors of North America 1917-1942, page 301. The cleaning equipment for Hill City’s twin elevator in Fairfield was lo- cated on the top floor.
The belt connecting the pulleys (Cal- Scale globe valves) on the wheat clean- er was cut from printer paper. Pipes leading from the distributor
are ¹₈″ styrene tube which approxi- mates the diameter of the prototype. The ends of each pipe were drilled out with a ³₃₂″ bit. Some are connected di- rectly to the distributor, while others are connected by segments of Robart Steel Pin Hinge Points (these will be covered in more detail in next month’s
54 AUGUST 2012
segment on the loading dock), replicat- ing short sections of flexible spout ob- served at Hill City. Some of the tubing was bent by inserting ³₆₄″ brass rod into it, forming the angle, then with- drawing the rod. Other tubing was cut, then reattached, to achieve the angle required to direct the pipe to its desig- nated storage bin. The pipes were con- nected after all of the other details on the top floor were in place (after this I was ready for analysis!). The distribu- tor was “pinned” to the head using brass wire. The spur wheel is a Rio Grande gear; the bearings and motor are from Western Scale Models.
Dump house Loose or sacked grain, in wagons or
trucks, was weighed in the dump house on a Howe scale. The printing beam for the scale was located in the office. The two grates in the dump house floor ac- commodated the different lengths of wagons and trucks. They were made using jigs. Two pieces of brass I-beam attached lengthwise between the joists keep the floor perfectly flat.
As advertised in a Kewanee Machin- ery & Conveyor Company catalog of 1938, the Kewanee standard truck and wagon lift “…makes it possible to un- load wagons or the longest trucks with, practically, no manual labor.” More- over, “…the Truck-Master Kewanee can be installed in the driveway…with- in a dump scale,” as it was at Hill City. The brown frame of the Truck-Mas- ter can be seen in the floor in front of the window (see photo at the bottom of page 54), located in the common wall between the dump house and office and made from three Grandt Line No. 5032 windows and styrene. The long horizontal beam bolted to the studs and located above the window near the top of the wall supports a Kewanee Overhead Truck Lift. The lift travels along this beam, and a second beam on an opposite wall of the elevator, by means of rollers at- tached to the ends of the frame. The frame was fashioned from Evergreen Scale Models No. 272 styrene I-beam and No. 261 styrene channel. Each of the four rollers was made by laminat-
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