Old Mill sorting floor and lower deck

The next 2 decks on the Pino Mill are the sorting floor deck and the lower deck of the Old mill floors
Both can be seen here fitted to the raised old mill deck. The lower deck fits into the square void of the upper or elevated deck and the sorting deck sits to the right. These were fairly easy to construct and completes the old mill minus the machinery, pulleys, wires, chains etc which will bring this portion alive.
Before leaving this section I'll get bare wood restained as needed..
After that, I need to take some undocumented time out and works on a couple of loco items which John Gibson has installed sound. Mostly decaling and renumbering is in order and a ladders and railings reinstalled.
That along with getting all the castings primered for this project, repaint a brass tender so John can get the Tsunami decoder I bought for that installed. I imagine it will take a couple of weeks....and I'll be back after that with the New Mill build. That will be interesting as its paint on top of stain showing lots of age. The techniques I 'll use for that will be explained then.  See you Soon! And thanks for reading.

all old mill decks fitted together

the lower old mill deck and sorting floor

Truss's and Weathering

I finished up the trusses yesterday. I like the look of  .20 wire representing truss hangers as its strung between the upper and lower supports. I had weathered them with Blacken It which was OK, but I still had to retouch  them in black acrylic. During handling the Blacken It bore off the wire.  A black craft paint worked just fine to finish the job.
Now a warning, but don't on't worry about weathering - I know its the fun part - until you've sanded, cleaned and otherwise rid your work of any random glue spots. Remember I am a sloppy gluist.  If you stain over those spots it just won't take. So clean up your glue before hand with Q tip or rag and get on with it.

5 trusses ready for stain and weathering

On my last entry, I had completely forgotten to talk about weathering techniques. Its surprisingly simple with these wood pieces and much of it is done before I get my hands on the glue. Specifically, after the stain dries and on those pieces requiring it I brush the wood with  one of those small wire brushes that you'd buy at the hardware store. Brush it in the same direction, not scrubbing but grazing the grain.  I use it to lighten and essentially blend the stain through out the wood. I do each piece individually and off the model being built. I do this to give each board a different look . Its the same stain throughout and you get similar color and shading, with subtle differences. I also use the brush by bearing down on it to thin the boards near the bottom of their length. Its the whole worn board thing.

I have a myriad of examples on the Pville where I didn't take that step and it felt like I was being lazy. Its just not the kind of work I  want to  display. Not really an appealing look. Start with a coarse paper and work your way down - with the last light sand to remove any and all fuzzy's that are clinging to your work. Other techniques as in splitting boards, creating knot holes, or nail holes  are well documented in the hobby press. I've even gone so far to utilize a #2 pencil for shading and creating shadows on some pieces over the years.

Now its on the the first of 2 equipment decks that will hopefully fit under the trusses and side walls.

See you next time. +

New Mill upper deck

The new mill  has two machinery decks. The main sits on 8x8" legs which supports 8x12's"and 4x12's" beams over the deck, The deck is finished off with 4x8" decking. A heavy duty structure, but necessary on the mill floor to support not only the carriages and machinery, but the constant movement of men and material on the cutting floor. This main deck along with an adjacent sorting deck and a lower machinery deck will complete the basic New Mill structure - however it won't get assembled until much later in the process. As this structure is open I am thinking about adding surface mounted LED's yellow bulbs to the trusses. It would highlight the machinery and scene underneath. I had bought a small number of lights and straight neck lamp holders from Ngineering last year. I knew I was going to use them!!!!!!!

                                       

                                          The deck basic framing spot glued to the template

The beams and joist in place

                                                                                                                               

                                                                               

The decking in place

The carriage pulley control wires and the pulleys themselves mount to the inside rectangular holes in the deck

I've started the build of the sorting deck which will sit to the left side of main deck as shown. A second deck will fill in the empty square space where the exactly blade is sitting. When they are done
I'l post it...........
Til next time...




                                                                                                                         

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.

Time goes fast when your having fun!

I recently read a post in the prototype modelers group by Bernard Kempinski, who is celebrating 10 years of building his fabulous Civil War layout USMRR Aquia Line. I realized that I started the Placerville Branch a year later in 2010 and my 9th anniversary approaches. I've slowed my building pace, due to having too many projects going at once. I've found it difficult to operate the layout  once a month and build at the same time. In this case I operate, solve post operations issues, then swing back to whatever structure project I'm working on. You wouldn't think that would be much, but for me it is. Once building, I'll ignore whats needed for setting up the next operation session and as my goal date gets closer I'll postpone it simply because I'm not ready. I'm thinking the solution is that operations should be my priority and everything else should follow. I fight it because what I really enjoy doing is building, setting scenes and using the skills I've learned along the way. However sharing the layout should be the bottom line - otherwise why build it?

From this 2010

to this 2019

My latest build is taking awhile, but it is coming along. My vision is, "I would pack as many buildings and scenes as possible into the Upper Placerville." Call it structure scenery if you will. In any event I'm using South River Modelworks' Robinson Electric as one of those buildings. Its a multilevel structure with 4 separate buildings in the mix. I've completed the larger building and its here

and here

More next time - right after this Fridays Op session. I'm printing out clearance and train order cards right now.