*** THIS PROJECT IS A VERY MAJOR WIP. MOST OF THE REDSTONE ISN'T COMPLETE/DOESN'T 100% WORK. ESPECIALLY THE SKIP CARS, I'M WAITING FOR AN UPDATE ON TRAINCARTS BEFORE I CAN GET THEM TO ACTUALLY WORK PROPERLY***

Hey! Long time no update! Especially for a pair of blast furnaces that actually work! Talk about a blast from the past, eh?

Exactly 3 years ago today (at the time of me writing this), I built my very first blast furnace in Minecraft. The key difference between it and all of my more recent designs (aside from being much more primitive and inaccurate) is that it actually took Iron Ore, Charcoal (acting as coke) and at the time Cobblestone (acting as limestone) and smelted them into Pig Iron Ingots (which is just a fancy term for iron ingots, it's not different despite what Tinker's Construct will make you think :P) in a semi-realistic way.

These two do above and beyond what the original Amber Furnace did over 1000 days ago. Not only are the most crucial elements still there (the skip cars, the iron smelter within the furnace itself, and the railed hot metal bridge), but now I've added in automatic material unloading on top of the stockhouse by rail, an automatic Larry Car for loading the skip hoists, and automatic launchers for the loaded cars of iron and slag.

If you don't know what a blast furnace does exactly, you should probably read this. If you do, though, please, continue to the next paragraph. Blast furnaces are large structures designed to smelt three ingredients; Iron Ore, Coke, and Limestone, into Molten Iron/Pig Iron and slag. The materials are loaded by train and crane in the stockhouse, and taken by a small electric car called a Larry Car. The Larry Car unloads its materials into Skip Cars, which are two small carts on an incline that are hoisted up and down the back of the furnaces. Once they reach the top, they load the materials into the furnace, where a blast of really hot air ignites the coke inside and melts the iron at about 2700° F. Later, the molten iron is tapped and loaded into special ladle train cars and taken to steel mills or iron casting plants. In some instances, if the mill was across a river, a hot metal bridge would be used, which was an immensely strong railroad bridge designed to withstand 1000 tons or more. It was specially reinforced to prevent any iron spills into the river in case of an accident, as the results could be catastrophic. Alright, up to speed? Let's continue.

So what's different? Well, besides nearly everything about the design of the furnaces (Which now aligns with my more commonly used Y-Shaped Post-WWII design that didn't start until my 2nd build), a lot of the mechanics are updated to be a bit more easily automatic and simple. The scale itself of the place has increased substantially as well. Yes, the plant operates using Minecarts instead of block built rail cars like my more recent projects, but the fake rails beneath the minecart tracks, as well as the radius on curves and size of the hot metal bridge are upscaled so they are one in the same size. This makes it much, MUCH better than the original Amber Furnace project, as I tore the thing down at first because I hated how inaccurate it was to real life. Now, this problem is much less prominent.

The major thing that has held me back from doing this for so long is the same problem I've had since I first redesigned the thing back in 2013: The Skip Hoist. The original had the skip hoist at a 45° degree angle to allow for the minecart tracks to slope upward to the top. But, this is INCREDIBLY unrealistic (and infact was the reason I redid them in the first place) to real life as actual skip hoists are much steeper, almost going straight up on larger furnaces. This design features a slope that's at about 60°, I'd say. But then, how does it work? Traincarts. Yep, a plugin made for something else (which is also useful for this build) has a feature of minecart elevators, which use a ladder as a block to push minecarts straight up or down. By placing 2 of these and then 2 more a block back from the first, I can create a steeper slope which works for a real world design of a skip hoist. ***But, it doesn't work yet. When I updated my server to 1.9, I didn't realize traincarts wasn't updated. Therefore, the thing doesn't work. But as soon as TC for 1.9 is released. I will come back and finish it***

TL;DR: 3 years ago I made a blast furnace that really worked. Today I did it again. And it was tough, took nearly three years to do. But now it works! Woo!

Well that's about all there is to say about it, the thing kinda speaks for itself. If you'd like, check out some of my other blast furnaces, especially my very first project to see where this came from.