My sawmill: a work in progress
What you see are the basic elements of a sawmill complex arranged in a logical working order but with very little detailing done. On the right are a group of trees that i have since painted as freshly cut Ponderosa Pine with brownish red trunks and Douglas Fir with gray trunks. The trees have had their branches removed and are waiting in a spot where I plan to build a small mill pond for floating the logs. Then the logs are pulled up on a cardboard simulated log conveyor into the sawmill building for cutting into planks. I plan to build a reasonably realistic log conveyor and outside lumber sorting rack but will leave the saws to my viewers' imagination. Sawdust can be loaded into hopper cars for shipment to a paper mill if there is enough of it or it can be burned in the conical sawdust burner that I scratchbuilt years ago and modified this week. Finished lumber is bundled up, banded, and stored in the yellow storage building that is about to under another overhaul. Eventually i plan to separate this industrial area from the residential neighborhood by a photo mural background.
This sawmill started off as a Pola factory kit imported by Atlas over 40 years ago. The wall were originally brick with an opening on both ends for freight cars, and it had a brick out building with a tall brick smoke chimney. If you are on older modeler, you probably built one.
After sitting about 15 years in its original form, in order to Americanize the building, I replaced the walls with corrugated sheet metal from Campbell Scale Models and kept the same windows and some of the internal supports. I also replaced the plastic simulated sheet metal roof with more aluminum roofing glued to sheet plastic. Unfortunately, the sheet styrene I first used with the roof sections was too thin to offer good support, and to make matter worse, I glued it with Walther's Goo. I HATE that cursed stuff! It stinks, it's messy, and it does not hold. OK, the upper roof held together, but the lower roofs sagged many scale feet and looked horrible.
The sad, beat up, old factory sat in a storage box for three years after my new layout was up and running, and other old buildings had been refurbished. I needed an American style sawmill rather than the two European style sawmills that Pola offered in the 1960's and imported by Atlas and later by Model Power. Walthers produced a sawmill first in HO, then N scale that was part of a sawmill-lumber yard-paper mill complex featured in a fabulous ad in the January 1997 Model Railroader and reviewed in the August 1997 issue.
I did not copy but drew my inspiration from the Walthers sawmill kit which is just about the same size as my old Pola factory. With nothing to lose, I ripped off the old lower roof sections and pulled off the real aluminum roofing material. Next I cut some sub-roof sections from thicker (0.040") sheet styrene from Evergreen Scale Models and bonded the Campbell roofing with J B Weld epoxy instead of that nasty Goo. The same sheet also forms the new concrete floor of the sawmill. To reinforce the building I made vertical supports of ESM styrene strips 0.040" thick and 1/4." I use the same strip stock for making internal alignment keys to position removable buildings from their bases, shore up poor building wall joints from the inside, and as a horizontal tab to keep custom made roof sections from slipping off their walls.
The yellow building that I use for lumber storage is also a Pola kit. They marketed the kit as a European style sawmill. I cut the central tower off because it bore no resemblance to any sawmill I've seen, but the rest of the building looked like an American lumber yard building. I gave it an aluminum roof many years ago that held up very well; however, I need to open up the second story and figure out a logical way for my N scale workers to get lumber up there.
And you thought model railroading was just about running trains!
My sawmill: a work in progress
What you see are the basic elements of a sawmill complex arranged in a logical working order but with very little detailing done. On the right are a group of trees that i have since painted as freshly cut Ponderosa Pine with brownish red trunks and Douglas Fir with gray trunks. The trees have had their branches removed and are waiting in a spot where I plan to build a small mill pond for floating the logs. Then the logs are pulled up on a cardboard simulated log conveyor into the sawmill building for cutting into planks. I plan to build a reasonably realistic log conveyor and outside lumber sorting rack but will leave the saws to my viewers' imagination. Sawdust can be loaded into hopper cars for shipment to a paper mill if there is enough of it or it can be burned in the conical sawdust burner that I scratchbuilt years ago and modified this week. Finished lumber is bundled up, banded, and stored in the yellow storage building that is about to under another overhaul. Eventually i plan to separate this industrial area from the residential neighborhood by a photo mural background.
This sawmill started off as a Pola factory kit imported by Atlas over 40 years ago. The wall were originally brick with an opening on both ends for freight cars, and it had a brick out building with a tall brick smoke chimney. If you are on older modeler, you probably built one.
After sitting about 15 years in its original form, in order to Americanize the building, I replaced the walls with corrugated sheet metal from Campbell Scale Models and kept the same windows and some of the internal supports. I also replaced the plastic simulated sheet metal roof with more aluminum roofing glued to sheet plastic. Unfortunately, the sheet styrene I first used with the roof sections was too thin to offer good support, and to make matter worse, I glued it with Walther's Goo. I HATE that cursed stuff! It stinks, it's messy, and it does not hold. OK, the upper roof held together, but the lower roofs sagged many scale feet and looked horrible.
The sad, beat up, old factory sat in a storage box for three years after my new layout was up and running, and other old buildings had been refurbished. I needed an American style sawmill rather than the two European style sawmills that Pola offered in the 1960's and imported by Atlas and later by Model Power. Walthers produced a sawmill first in HO, then N scale that was part of a sawmill-lumber yard-paper mill complex featured in a fabulous ad in the January 1997 Model Railroader and reviewed in the August 1997 issue.
I did not copy but drew my inspiration from the Walthers sawmill kit which is just about the same size as my old Pola factory. With nothing to lose, I ripped off the old lower roof sections and pulled off the real aluminum roofing material. Next I cut some sub-roof sections from thicker (0.040") sheet styrene from Evergreen Scale Models and bonded the Campbell roofing with J B Weld epoxy instead of that nasty Goo. The same sheet also forms the new concrete floor of the sawmill. To reinforce the building I made vertical supports of ESM styrene strips 0.040" thick and 1/4." I use the same strip stock for making internal alignment keys to position removable buildings from their bases, shore up poor building wall joints from the inside, and as a horizontal tab to keep custom made roof sections from slipping off their walls.
The yellow building that I use for lumber storage is also a Pola kit. They marketed the kit as a European style sawmill. I cut the central tower off because it bore no resemblance to any sawmill I've seen, but the rest of the building looked like an American lumber yard building. I gave it an aluminum roof many years ago that held up very well; however, I need to open up the second story and figure out a logical way for my N scale workers to get lumber up there.
And you thought model railroading was just about running trains!