It is more prototypic to have an elbow bend in grain pipes or have them straight from the bin(s) to conveyor(s)? I Know it's 'my layout' but wasn't sure if one avenue was more common. If straight, use coat hangers or styrene? I have a small, country layout with a grain area, so not going for something massive.
Tkx
~Lee
They should be straight down from the top of the elevator to the bins below. At the bottom of the elevator is a pit, where incoming grain is dumped. It is pulled or drops from there to the pickup point at the bottom of the "leg." The leg is the "elevator part," a long belt with wooden buckets on it originally, but much updated and mostly metal now. It's enclosed by a sheet metal housing, so you don't normally see it.
The grain arrives at the top of the leg, falling into what I call the distributor. It's a big funnel at the bottom of whcih are outlets to the tubing that carries the grain into indvidual bins or silos. From up there, it's all gravity, so there won't be any place with much more than a slight kink in the tubing for grain to hang up in. Ordinarily, that's why they should be straight. Long ones often have an arrangement of truss rods or cables to stiffen them.
There are enclosed conveyor systems that curve instead, but these are usually horizontal and not associated with an elevator, but end users. I helped install one that pulled pig formula through to drop into feeders in a hog house in the early 70s at my uncle and aunt's farm. It was maybe 3" diameter, but I know that are bigger ones. This one used a cable with buttons attached to it every so often, which would pull the feed along the tube to drop into the feeders.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
Right and Wrong. They *can* do both. Obviously if they have an auger inside they will have to be straight.
But many systems blow the grain (or other products) through the pipes, and nice gentle curves work real fine with this.
I was visiting a bapery in Dickinson, flour (and sugar for than matter) arrived in covered hoppers, a hose was connected to the bottom, and the product delivered to the mixing bowls as if it were on tap. The grain cars *were* used as storage until they were empty, they did not have dedicated bins. They empty the cars out far too fast to worry about drayage, but I would worry about shortage. Oh Well.
ROAR
The Route of the Broadway Lion The Largest Subway Layout in North Dakota.
Here there be cats. LIONS with CAMERAS
You won't see many bends in grain pipes because they often have augers in them. These can be up to 12" in diameter and possibly bigger depending on the capacity of the machines used to make the augers. It's kind of neat to see these things take roll s of strip steel and cold process bend the steel into a torus. Then they run a pipe through the center of the torus, weld it every several inches or so and "voila" almost instant auger. Hope this helps.
Jim (with a nod to Mies Van Der Rohe)
True, augurs and the drops from the top of the levator look quite similar. Augurs tend to be in hoirizontal orientations or tilted up to lift corn from one bin to another. Typicially, the steeply descending drops are simply tubes. You will sometime see a long one stretching horizonatlly from an elevator head over to a line of bins, where drops take it into each bin as needed.
Augurs also typically have a motor attached at one end to drive the screw inside.
Prototypes in Montana
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