Windmill-Powered Pump House - myLargescale.com

Windmill-Powered Pump House
BY
Jack Thompson
Reston, Virginia, USA
(Buildings Forum/Topic: Windmill-Powered Pump House - 20 Sep 2007)
After I completed my water tower (see Victorian Water Tower - recently posted in this forum,)
I decided the next thing I needed was a pump house to fill it with water for my locos.

In the days before electricity was readily available, stationary steam engines were sometimes
used to power the pumps that brought water up from below ground. If you were lucky enough
to have a water source above your tower, then you could just let gravity do the job - but that
wasn't often the case, particularly out on the pancake-flat Great Plains. There, the railroads
often resorted to an abundant and (usually) reliable alternate power source - the wind. (They
were "going green" long before it became PC.) BTW, if anybody's got any period photos of
R.R. water-tank windmills, I'd love to see 'em posted here.
I had a bunch of cedar lying around, so I cut it into strip wood on my table saw and used that
almost exclusively, except for castings from Schomberg Scale Models (door and frame),

Muella Scale Models (wind mill, motor and stand) and Grandt Line Products (windows) and
some styrene tubing from Evergreen for the stove pipe. Here you see it all framed out.
Here you see the finished product hooked up to the water tower in a "mock-up" I made of the
depot area that will eventually be on my (yet-to-be-built) layout.

Another shot from "ground level."

A close-up of the front.

Here's the back and side with the coal-box for the stove - can't let that pump freeze up, come
winter.

This is the best windmill casting I've found so far - but I did add some extra detail (like wood
grain, outer rim, etc.) I also installed sealed ball bearings on the blade wheel axle and the motor
mount pivot.
When I took it outside today (for the first time) to take these pictures, I was delighted with the
windmill's performance. It turned into the wind and started spinning when it didn't even seem
as if there was a breath of wind blowing. Boy, those ball bearings are great! (Hmmm, I wonder
if I should put 'em on my truck wheels, too.)

Here are some additional close-ups of the roof, tower and platform details. BTW, I didn't use
any plans or prototype photos - I just sorta made it up as I went along using, what I hope are,
common sense and good engineering principles.

I was inspired by the tools in my photo-editing software to make this "old timey-looking"
vignette.
I will soon be posting some updated pix of the only other structure (so far, anyway) on my
layout - Ft. Mallison Depot. Meanwhile, your questions and comments on the above would be
welcome.
Greg - Thanks for your postings of windmill-powered pumps for RR water tanks. They're
great!

Here are a few more related images from my "collection":
Not exactly a "prototype" but it does show that the manufacturers knew where their market
was.

Anybody got any more?
Thanks, everyone, for all the nice comments.
Now, to answer your questions:
Robert - The doorknob is part of the casting, but I did enhance it a little with a blob of "J-B
Weld", a two-part epoxy, to make it just a bit bigger.
Bob M. - (and André) The sealed ball bearings look something like this to begin with:
They can be found online from various sources (just Google "miniature ball bearings" or
something like that) and in several sizes. I mounted one horizontally at the top of the mounting
stand by drilling out the existing hole to the outside diameter of the bearing. The air motor has
a vertical post (brass) that fits the bearing's inside diameter.
For the blade wheel, I replaced the cast hub with the ball bearing assembly itself, gluing the
spokes directly to the outer race of the bearing. It turns on a post made of brass tubing sticking
horizontally from the motor.
This shows you where to look in the bigger pictures on the previous page.

André - The board & batten siding is done just like the "real deal." I cut to size and glued (with
"Titebond III") the vertical boards to the frame, then covered the interstices with the battens,
also glued with Titebond. When they dried good 'n' tight, I sanded them even with an electric
orbital pad sander.
The wind motor doesn't actually work - no gears or anything like that. It just turns into the wind
on its vertical axis and spins on its horizontal axis. Purely for show.
I hope I answered your question about the ball bearings for you above.
Jim - The overall height of the windmill - ground to tip - is 25.5 inches, which scales out to just
over 43 feet.
Hope that does it. Thank you again for your interest. If anyone else has other questions, don't
hesitate to "fire away."
Richard - Good question. I actually thought about installing some tin or copper flashing there,
but eventually decided that would take more effort than it was worth. Besides, I really don't
care if the roof leaks or not - there's nothing inside, not even a floor.
As for leaving it outside, I'll probably bring it in during the winter, but it's built almost entirely
from cedar and held together with brass nails and Titebond III glue (the water-proof kind,) so I
think it'll be just fine outside for the most part. In fact, I hope it will get weathered to some
extent.
TJ, Greg, Joe (et al.) - I'm glad to hear your comments and I'm very glad that what I've posted
here has been of some value to you.
I guess that's the main reason I do it. Sure, I like to show off my stuff and it's nice to get my ego
stroked by the response (however, I'm certainly willing to take the hits as they come, too,) but I
remember how lost I felt not too long ago when I saw others' beautiful work and wondered how
could I ever do things like that myself. In fact, I still feel like that, to some extent.
If I can serve to inspire and/or instruct in any way by posting all this stuff here on MLS, then
I'm entirely satisfied (and feel somewhat justified) in doing that. We're all here to help, and to
learn from, each other, so "keep those cards and letters coming in, folks." And don't hesitate to
criticize as well as praise as you feel warranted. As I've said here before: if it's true you learn
from your mistakes, then I've learned a lot, and I look forward to learning more.
Nevertheless, thanks again for all your nice remarks.

Originally posted by, Vance Bass:
OK, I know everyone is going to throw rocks at me, but I really do have one tiny criticism.
The wood grain on the tail is wrong. They used sheet metal for those (although the casting is
way too thick for sheet metal). But hey, who's going to be looking at that? I am a windmill
fanatic and this is one of the best windmill models I've ever seen. And the first I've seen that
models the pump house, too, which is a terrific addition.
I have a CAD drawing of the stencil Aermotor used on the tail sail, if anyone's interested.
You could easily make a decal of it, or just use it as a guide to painting the logo by hand.
Vance:
Thanks for pointing that out. If I had thought about it, I'd have realized that a thin sheet metal
vane (or tail) would have been better. However, I had to work with what I had. If you take a
look at the wheel arms (spokes) between the hub and the inner rim - to which the sails are
attached - they're pretty crude, too.
Nevertheless, the overall effect is good. It's still much better than the ubiquitous circle of tin
with slits cut in it.
Since you're never going to fool anybody into thinking it's real (the size, if nothing else, kinda
gives it away,) any model only needs to create the right impression of the thing it represents
and not necessarily be an exact miniature recreation of it.
At least, that's the best rationalization I can come up with for not detailing a model to the n-th
degree. I can live with that.
In case anybody is interested, this is the kind of thing Vance is talking about - what a typical
"real" windmill should look like - the wheel, at any rate. It is very delicate and would take a
master of the soldering iron (which I'm not) to create.

You can see that, in comparison, mine is really only a crude approximation. But, as I said
above, it works for me.
Steve,
There are two definitions for the word "criticize" in the dictionary:
1. To indicate the faults of someone or something in a disapproving way.
2. To form and express a sophisticated judgment of a literary or artistic work.
I definitely took Vance's comments as an expression of the second kind. And I certainly respect
his opinion.
Since I was planning to go to Roger Cutter's open-house at his RGS East on Sunday, I had
brought my recently renovated pump house/water tower "diorama" to reinstall on his layout.
There was no room for it on Clem O'Jevich's Warrior Run Loco Works modular layout, so I put
it over on the model contest table and filled out an entry form just so I'd have a place to keep it
safe while at the show. To my astonishment, it not only took first place in the kit-bashed
structures category (the water tower is from a Piko kit) but also took Best-in-Show! Go figure.

You may remember seeing this water tower and pump house in separate postings in these pages
before. As mentioned above, the "Victorian" water tower is bashed from a Piko kit and I had
built the pump house completely from scratch except for a Muella Scale Models
windmill resin casting. Unfortunately, when I set in up on Roger's layout, the windmill caught
the wind so well that it got blown over and when the spinning windmill wheel hit the deck, the
blades went flying everywhere.
The solution to this problem was to securely mount the water tower and pump house on a
heavy concrete backer-board base and to recreate the windmill wheel and vane from brass. The
"air motor" and its mount were used as a basis for the rebuild and the sealed ball bearing races
for the swivel and the wheel hub were also reused.

I found plans for a typical farm windmill online, scaled them out for my model, and used them
as a "template" for the new wheel. Luckily, a slice from a copper plumbing elbow proved to be
just the right diameter and thickness for the inner band. I cut the "sails" from thin sheet brass,
clamped them all together and cut a slot through them all at once, about a third of the way from
the ends, for the outer band. It was then a simple matter of bending a piece of brass bar stock
into a circle of the proper diameter and using it to set the proper angle for each of the sails.

I then soldered the whole thing together. In this shot, the inner end of each blade, bent at a right
angle, has not yet been trimmed off and the ball bearing hub has not yet been installed. The
vane was constructed in a similar manner using the same sheet brass and L-shaped brass "angle
iron."
I guess while I'm at it, I should also congratulate all the other winners of the various categories
in the contest. I must confess, it's gratifying to receive recognition for your work from your
peers.