Hop, Hop, Hop, To The Hopper
Greetings and salutations Brian from my corner of the slowly defrosting "Eastern Wilderness @ 1140 feet above mean sea level" Ha! we will see about defrosting after tonights snow storm.
If you want you can prowl the board here(suppliers corner) for sand hoppers and or agregate bins and please contact my dear friend george baker as he can help you immensely as can Lyn Bates and Mr. Nordell and many others.
Anyway its always nice to meet another servo head on the board, so you build larger than quarter scale I take it? I have trucks and an old helicopter-I probably will upgrade to a sixty size ship as it is 32 cc.
Typically a sand hopper is fed either by a conveyor coming a large deck screen with a washed sand auger at the bottom feeding the conveyor or in some cases an entire series of low level hoppers are used to feed any system with an under bin conveyor belt or gates as you so desire to model let say for asphault make up sand or concrete mix and they can be heated as well-no do not let your brain explode on that part!
In the mine safety and health administrations view any bin covered or not is considered a storage silo; they can be round, square or rectangular with zero access unless a bin permit is authorised by a corporate official- I will tell you more about that mess if you like as I was involved in it as it affected the the entire countries-USA handling of storage bins-per osha and msha.
To save your self a lot of time and effort typically an overhead bin with 45 to 70 degree from horizontal sloped sides looks exactly like a pyramid upside down with the last four feet-for example -the point downward cut away to allow room for the gates or a transition point for conveyor belt skirting.
The hopper is supported by as many legs as needed along the sides of the hopper in relation to the weight of the material in the bins and the legs are typically bolted to concrete anchors/foundations supporting the hopper- you would be able to use big cement building blocks for realism to anchor the hopper.
Also the hopper may have metal ribs welded to it for additional stiffness.
Drawn and sized to scale(the underside) it would have to be 12 scale feet wide for your truck model at a minimum depending on the size of truck-road or if a quarry truck much wider-20 feet etc. with at least 14 feet of scale clearance.
If you write george please send him my regards and tell him I think I finally emptied my old mail bin out:^)
lzaharis ■
Correct term needed and/or list of mfgs
First of all I'd like to apologize if there would be a more appropriate place for this posting than the one I picked. Also I want to let you know that I am not in the material handing field nor do I know anyone personally that is, so that's why I am posting here.
I need the correct term for the thing, (I would call it a hopper) that I am looking for. Even better would be a manufacturer(s) that have a nice brochure or scale drawing that I could download or that they would mail me.
I build 1:16 scale radio controlled models of trucks and construction equipment and I want to build a model of a "hopper" that a truck would drive under and get loaded with some sort of material (like fine sand in my case.) It would be gravity discharged with a gate that opens at the bottom via hydraulic or pneumatic cylinders. Normally it's loaded by some sort of conveyor or large grab crane. Looks like a square funnel. I am attaching a picture as well to illustrate what I mean.
I've searched for hopper, surge bin, truck loader and a number of other terms and didn't seem to find what I am looking for.
If any company is willing to share a drawing or brochure I'd really appreciate it. I know you won't make a sale but when I'm finished I would share photos of it in use and you might have a nice news article for your webpage.
Thanks in advance
Brian ■