With a front and side view I could bring it into Sketchup. Knowing that it was an illustration of a 6″ gate valve it was simple to scale the completed Sketchup model from the valve throat.

I made the decision that I needed three gate valves inside the Pump House. My reasoning was : .. it would add to the ‘mechanical clutter’ in the Pump House. It would just be ‘cool’. Figure that they would have had

1. One gate valve on the line to the storage tank
2. a second gate valve directly to the coke oven bank
3. a third gate valve that would by-pass both of those to route the discharge back to the river

Just to go into a little more depth ..

1. The main water supply will be a water tank placed above the On18 track level. I can easily get 12-in separation between the ovens and where the bottom of a tank could go. This will allow for a scale 36-ft stand pipe which will supply sufficient pressure for the coke ovens.
2. If for some reason the water tank has to be by-passed, this gate valve would discharge directly to the coke oven bank. I’m not clear (haven’t really looked into it) just what kind of pressure this would be but .. if the water tank was damaged for example, it would be sensible to provide water to the coke ovens and washery no matter what pressure.
3. I would think that it would also make sense to by-pass both (1) and (2) .. working/testing the pump .. in which case, the discharge will be out the side of the Pump House and back into the river. The best part of this .. in addition to more pipe .. is that we get a cool discharge pipe sticking out of the Pump House.

As I said, this was early in the process. I wasn’t too concerned about having everything exact to a fraction of an inch as I was making a gate valve that would be ‘similar’ to the original .. a mimic you see .. not an exact copy.