The New Mill

There are 2 mills in the Twin Mills kit. The "New Mill" and the Old Mill." The new mill has open sides with trusses built to hold up the walls. The floor sits at 2 different elevations to accommodate the log carriages, carriage drives and rails, etc. 
Everything is built on templates which makes for accurate, and repeatable structure modeling
The first 2 sections are completed except for final sanding and weathering. Having always been sloppy on the glue side of things, I've switched to toothpicks and a glob of glue on post it note to deliver canopy glue and or medium CA to the places needing gluing. I'm still learning, but sanding everything afterwards to get the best appearance possible is part of it. I'll let everyone know when I become a glue master, but don't hold your breath.

left side with siding being applied

As shown the frames have been built over the template, which is over wax paper smoothed over the drawing. I've started the siding process as well. There are two windows on this side and although the siding initially covers the window openings I'll go back and open them up, apply laser cut window frames and make the window exterior frames.
Here are the complete building sides of the new mill, again without final sanding and weathering touch up.

right side - no siding - framing only

Completed left side with windows

Now its time to work on the trusses. You can see the template I've built for them on the upper left.

The Mill at Pino Grande

I've been waiting to build the Michigan California Lumber Co. Pino Mill for 15 years. I bought the Twin Mills Deer Creek Mill kit without the wood building materials and supplied the materials through Northeastern Scale lumber Co. I had read that this kit was based on the Pino Mill, yet designed by Brett Gallant to take his slant as a model and craftsmen kit creator on the Pino. That means its not purely prototypical, but its a beautiful set of diorama buildings..
This thing requires space. 3' x 3'!!! And sadly its space that I don't have. My plan is to build the entire kit and see what fits and what doesn't. This is how the instruction manual creates all the buildings first then lays them out in a diorama style. Its up to the builder how they fit.  Although the Placerville Branch is not finished, I've come to a juncture in my modeling that my slowly aging skill set, along with some ongoing health issues, I thought it prudent to take on this project.
So lets begin.
All the wood had to be cut and organized into bags with post it notes describing bag contents, dimensions and count of each wood type. Remembering that the wood supply box had been in the closet for over a decade, I used calipers and scale rule to verifying dimensions. I cut 17 different bags of wood totaling 1,200 pieces. They are used to build templates and guides.
There are 2 staining process.
1. bulk staining where tin foiled pans 12" in length are filled with an acrylic stain mixture and the wood is dropped in pans for 24 hours
2. the swiping method where the stain is applied to each piece individually with a brush.
In either case each piece had to be inspected and lightly sanded and prepped before staining.
Here is what the staining table looked like at random stages of the process.

This took time to get all this wood properly stained. In the upper photo you can see the plain aluminum pans I used to hold my stain.
This stain, where I let the wood lay in the stain for 24 hours, as mentioned was acrylic. The formula follows
20 oz. water
1/2 teaspoon of black India ink
1 tsp Polly Roof Brown - easily substituted. with another acrylic in this common color
1 tsp Polly oily Black - same comment as above
1 1/4 tsp of Polly Railroad Tie Brown - maybe difficult to find, I used Badgers Rail Brown in my mix
I mixed at least 40 ounces to fill each container properly and to cover the wood.

The wiped stain are solvent paints made up as a percentage of the whole
30% Floquil Roof Brown - I substituted the Floquil with Scalecoat paint across the board
10% Floquil Grime - same substitution
60% Dio-Sol - again I used Scalecoat thinner which seemed to work fine based on my results.
I let the wood dry for at minimum 24 hours out in the garage and I was lucky to have warm days to get it that part done.The process calls for a brushed on stain using a 1/2" brush followed by a wipe with paper towels that was then dried for 24 hours.
Although I have all the metal casting cleaned, filed and sitting ready for spray painted a primer base coat, I'll save  showing that when the base coat is applied
Next time I start to put the buildings together. Remember this is board on board all the way through. Not for the faint of heart.
Stay tuned.

How a model photo got me thinking about expansion of operations

This modeled photo was taken on the Placerville Branch at Folsom. The camera is aimed east toward Earl Fruit Company. I had fiddled with photo shop elements to create the clouds above the yard, but living here in California it reminded me more of fire clouds then it did of a stormy day.
That got me thinking about Southern Pacific water cars. I found that SP placed water cars around their system in areas where fire was a threat in the dry California summer.
When I attended the NMRA sponsored Roseville Model Train meet in November, I got a great deal on a handful of tank cars which I want convert to water cars. I was so anxious to try this out, that I took 4 of these newly purchased tank cars, and had them dropped off at the siding in Dugan by an Eastbound local headed up the hill. I put together a multi car car card for shipment. During the session on Friday I'll have the Dugan extra 264 return these cars. It should add a bit of a challenge for the extra out and back that works Dugan and the spurs off the siding.  Its typically unimpeded but with the added water cars will be slightly less so.  
Its been months since I tried this and it definitely adds some challenges for the extra operator on the Dugan out and back.  On my branch line model of the Placerville Branch every new idea that can come together on Ops night is a plus.