What is this ... more trains? No it is much worse, true Horror!

One last post from the second quarter.  These elements have actually been done for a few weeks, but I misplaced two of them and had no pictures so I finally found the jail breakers today.

 No I have not lost it (any more than usual) and meandered off into train modeling.  I picked this up on ebay for 10$ as a key component for some eye candy for the Blood Red Skies game.

Before I get to the Tomytec Nightmare, allow me to start with a couple of small Z scale buildings.  Here is an old Factory.  It is Resin casting that came painted from a guy on Ebay, cost 9$, and I just liked how it looked.  I like that it will readily accept smoke markers when it gets bombed.  It is 2.5 inches by 2.5 inches and 1.5 inches tall.

This is a little Hobo, or as the British call them "traveler" encampment built around  a modified abandoned z scale freight car.  It is 3D printed and comes as seen for 9$ once again.  It measures 2 inches by three inches and is about a inch call.

Here is the finished freak show.  It looks the part and that is what matters, but do not ever allow yourself to make the mistake of getting into one of these if it can be avoided.

So what is the problem you ask, well like so many horror stories it starts out rather simple.  There are 39 pieces in the kit.  The pieces break down into what I deem three sections: the cracking tower (I think that was what they called it back then anyway) with 14 parts, the cooling tower (thin tube coming back down) with once again 15 parts.  And the base with 10 parts.  That is all.  And there starts the problems, there are no directions at all.  The only thing you get are the tiny pictures on the outside of the box for assistance.  OK, how bad can 38 parts be right ... right?  Took me a month to figure it out.  Well three weeks, and then another week to sort out a mistake.

So what was so difficult?  Well let me start with the Vertical Tower.  The pipes come in two widths, obviously from the pictures the wider tubes go on the bottom and the thinner tubes go on the top.  Among the five larger tubes there two special pieces, one piece that I presumed was a base since the other pieces were slightly recessed at the top to allow the lower piece to go into the next piece up and the 'bottom' did not have the same fit at its bottom.  There was also a circle raised on the base plate so it appeared that the base piece should fit onto the base plate, however the fit was EXTREMELY tight when I tried it without glue.  All the other larger pieces were too wide because of their recessed bottoms so they were too loose.  Further more, each of the three standard lower tubes and the other special larger tube (which necks down to he size of the narrower upper tubes) have a round open port at the mid point of the tube.  The kit includes four pressure covers to glue over these ports.  Unfortunately, that "bottom" piece has two ports on opposite sides which means I need sis pressure release plates and only get four in the kit.  If I use all five larger pipe parts I end up with two obvious holes in my "pressurized system" which looks ridiculous.  In the end I decided to skip the "bottom" piece as then I have four pressure plates and pour pressure plate points so all was well - for now.

There are five pieces in the thinner tower section, three standard pipes sections, a walkway and a pipe cap.  These went together fairly loosely except where ever I attached the walkway, which instantly made for a tight fit.  This makes no sense as the walkway goes around the recessed pipe and then has the next section pushed down on it so there is no reason what was a "loose fit" should "tighten" because a spacer is added, but happened every time and I tried all combinations.  Irregardless of that logical incongruity, I used all five pieces of the upper tower

The cooling tower consists of five one inch pipes, one 3/4 inch pipe, three 90 degree bends, two 180 degree bends, the condensing chamber, the two stands for the condensing chamber, and a base piece.  Here is where the next problem arose.  The cooling tower runs from the top of the cracking tower to the top of the condensing chamber.  When I decided to delete the base piece of the cracking tower I changed the overall height of the cracking tower by a half inch.  However, the cooling tower only comes in one and and three quarter inch sections so how can I adjust for a half an inch less when I can only adjust in, a quarter inch, three quarter inch, or full inch increments?  After many trials and errors I roughly figured out that if I swapped the three quarter inch tube which is supposed to go in the top section of pipe from the cracking tower to the condensing chamber to the bottom section as part of the outflow from the condensing chamber and realigned where I put the condensing chamber (the base is equal sided so it can be assembled any way you want and the pictures on the box show obvious differences from each other) on the base, it looked like the measurements were right. Please remember that all these cooling tower parts fit loosely together so I had to tray and hold six loose pieces together and fit them into two holes.

When I started gluing the cooling tower together I had a brain fart and idiotically glued the 90 degree bend to one of the long pipes reversed.  Naturally, (I was using Gorilla Glue) the glue set in the seconds it too me to notice the mistake so I could not get the two apart, thus ruining them.  I decided to steal a section of pipe from the outflow pipe and would have to figure that out to do on that end, at the end.  The end result was that the cooling tower looks a bit awkward, but did fit.

The base went together easily as all the parts are reversible

Next, I painted up a z scale "pump shack" (sounds like a B-52's song) that I found on an ebay site for trains for four dollars.  Tin roof and some galvanized piping.

Here is the reverse side of the "pump shack".

Here we have two large holding tanks for holding the raw oil for our refinery.

Here we have the Propane gas containers.  Discovered by French chemists in 1821, Propane was identified just before World War I as being a derivative of the gasoline production process.  . 

Here we have four smaller tanks for holding the refined products . 

Finally here we have the entire refinery.  The crude oil is stored in the large tanks on the right.  The Refining tower process the oil into its desirable parts.  These parts are then stored separately in the tanks of the left.  All the tanks are painted white and have a heavy coat of magic wash on them.  Notice how serendipity solved the pipe issue on the cracking tower.  It turns out that the odd pipe attached to the "pumping shack"is the perfect height to complete the pipe coming down from the condensing chamber 

So in the final analysis while the Tomytec refining tower looks good in their pictures on the box, but lacks directions completely and does not fit together well so I do not recommend it, the rest of these items are great.  I am sure that the German bombers will enjoy flying over this effect on the table.  I also imagine some pilots will let drop some bombs on it regardless of their actual assigned targets.