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.