I look forward to watching

I look forward to watching this one!  The KMP kits look great but I've never actually seen a build thread for one.

Preparations

This is an old school kit-- that means you get instructions and enough scale lumber to stock a small hobby shop:

There are some white metal castings that will be assembled into the machinery, and instructions. 8 pages of instructions, along with 8 pages of drawings.

It is imperative to read all instructions before starting the build. I know we always say that, but I mean it in this case. These instructions are quite detailed, and reasonably clear, but the order of operations is not always the most efficient or even possible. There's also a lot of shuffling around between pages to find out how an instruction relates figure 2 on drawing two to figure 12 on drawing 8 (which also includes figures 21-23.) (The figures are not in construction order, they are scattered around the drawings to save space.) It all makes sense eventually, but plan a  couple of extra hours just to pour over the drawings.

The first part of preparation is to stain all of that scale lumber. My layout is in the redwoods, and I wanted to build the model of old growth heartwood. I started with a bottle of Builder's In Scale "Red" wood stain. The first coat left the wood looking like cherry popsicle sticks. 2 more coats and I had more or less what you see above (Allow for about 17 steps of color correction from my camera to your monitor.) It still looks like a Home Depot picnic table (cheap pine dyed red). The colors I'd like are more like these:

This is 90 year old redwood, still visible in the cupboard under the stairs in my house. As you can see, redwood comes in many shades, but I favor the darker (heartwood) colors. I think I'm going to be shopping for more stain, maybe my local lumber store has something that will darken the wood and retain that red glow.

Of course redwood turns grey when exposed to the sun, so this is the inside color I'm fussing about. I'll be drybrushing the building with acrylics when it is done, and if worse comes to worst, I'll just paint the whole thing.

Oh well, at least my hand is ready for Halloween-

pqe

Pressing on

I decide to go ahead with some building, even though I don't have the color to my satisfaction. The Build starts with the floor:

The floor is mostly thin plywood. The instructions say to build the floor, then scribe boards into the plywood, but I didn't think I could apply enough pressure to scribe lines without damaging the attached beams, so I scribed first. Of course that meant another layer of stain. Ugh. Here's the underside:

Surprise! Only the ends of the beams are represented. The beams extending to the left in this picture get planked, one board at a time:

Note the use of various tools to try to keep the boards in line. Some variation is part of the charm of these board by board kits, but you do see a lot that suggest they were built by drunken carpenters. I'm using a NWSL chopper to keep ends square and everything the same length. Every cut end needs a drop of stain, but with the end grain it goes on dark. I've finally gotten over my agluesiea (inability to apply glue without getting it on the part, the bench, the floor, my hair and any passing dogs). I put a drop of Aleene's tacky on the bottom of a silicone bowl, then use a dental widget (bristles burned off with a solder iron) to spread the glue where needed. Excess gets scraped off with a toothpick.

After the floor was built, I took a shot at fixing the color. I made some washes from India ink, tried them on the bottom, then put the most promising mix on the top:

Success was mixed at best. Here and there is a streak of color I like. I can get a good grime, which I applied in the areas that will have machinery. Then I tried for a grey, starting with white and adding a drop or two of black. It didn't work so well. First because my white and black turned out to be different kinds of ink, but mostly because the white has blue in it. I guess it's like white shirts, a bit of blue makes it brighter. However, the blue over the red gave me an ugly purple. (You can still see some on a couple of boards that were too thin for the sandpaper to reach.)

The next experiment will be with some lumber store stains-- maybe walnut.

pqe

The works

The next steps in the instructions were about building the machinery for sawing and planing logs, so I put the stain issue aside. The castings are pretty decent, with thin, easy to clean flash and no sprue marks to speak of. There were a few voids, but not where they will show. All flash marks were filed off with diamond files and burnished with one of my old flute tools. Then everything got a coat of black primer. After that, it was just assembly and painting.

Many of the assemblies were built on the floor, and placement is pretty critical. Locations were given in scale feet from the left and bottom edges. I used my father's dividers (ca. 1935 or so) to transfer measurements from a scale rule to the model, and either set up a guide, or made a mark. Here's the nearly finished set:

This was about a weeks work, mostly because I made mistakes and had to redo things (The piping you see is the fourth set.) I keep reciting the words of Oliver DiCicco "If you want to do high quality work, you have to be willing to remake a piece one hundred times." Some notes;

• The pieces are not that red. Well the bricks under the boiler are, but my Sony camera seems to really love the color.
• The instructions said to build 17 rollers for the conveyor (where the cut boards land), but the drawing only showed 15. So I added an extra at each end. Then the instructions said to add one to the saw casing.
• I made circular scratches on the saw by chucking it in my bench motor and applying a diamond file while it spun. They don't show much in the picture, but they catch the light nicely.
• The big belt is made of paper, and boy is that a pain to get tight. That color is off in the picture too- it's really a leather-like tan. (I gotta spend more time with Photoshop.) There's a lot more belting in the future, because everything runs off of the steam engine. I found that the kind of paper cutter that cuts with a slide action is the best way to make these belts.
• The instructions tell you to drill out some dimples on the boiler for pipes , but leave a couple out. There is an overflow pipe and a drain that are described in the instructions, but not shown in the drawings.
• I may redo the saw case yet again This one follows the instructions, but doesn't look much like the prototype.

Next is building walls, so I've got to get the color issue sorted once and for all.

Thanks for looking,

pqe

Aaaarrrgh!

I used to custom finish furniture for a living and found that if I needed to tone down too much of a color component (too green, too yellow, TOO RED) that the best thing was to move across the color wheel and apply its contrasting color. In your case, green. Of course, most of the time, this was a more subtle adjustment than what is needed here, so I could just add a little of the color to the finish (usually a lacquer) and apply it in very thin coats until I achieved the desired tone.

If I was well off the mark, I would first wash the piece with lacquer thinner, scrubbing vigorously, sometimes with sand paper, until things were toned down enough to try again. That might help here, using perhaps a soft toothbrush to do the scrubbing.

Just some thoughts, with some experience behind them, that may help.

David Stewart

I am enthralled

I thoroughly enjoy your build descriptions, pqe. They're not highbrow "here's how you should do it," they're much more satisfying "here's how I did it." That is so refreshing, generous, and engaging. 

Thanks. I'm looking forward to future posts.

Jeff Allen

Jeff nails it

Hey, yeah!  That's what I like about your posts too.

For the intense red, maybe try sanding it a little.  I would have been inclined to start with a sienna stain or wash.  You might be able to sand back to some raw wood and shift the colour that way.  I would expect green is going to deaden the colour toward grey, and perhaps quite a dark grey too.

Good luck!  Looks like a fun kit.

Rene'

Yeah, but

Rene' is right in one respect...if you try to counter what you've got with green it'll get really dark, but in my experience you won't get grey, you'll get ugh green, or worse, Christmas.

Your platform is plywood, which means thin plys. Sanding it to get back to raw wood is a recipe for a real disappointment. And with three coats of stain on the strip wood, there is a very high probability it is pretty well stained through. For your loose strip wood, get a plastic tub and pour in some nasty solvent (lacquer thinner, acetone, mek) and immerse it; giving a stir now and again to agitate the stain off. It may surprise you how much of the stain will wash out.

And on your platform, try some solvent on a rag on the underside to see if the results are encouraging. If they are, then try scrubbing a bit...wonders may occur.

This is all based on my experience with pulling my own a** out of the fire on some fairly expensive items, but rest assured, sometimes my a** was grass.

As you noted, there is always paint.

And, yeah, I too like your style...your explanations on matters electrical always help, and never leave me (an electrical moron) feeling like my parenthetical interjection.

David Stewart 

I'm watching you

I bought this kit at Caboose Hobbies in Denver a month back, and will be watching your progress with interest. I'm planning to save time by airbrushing the whole thing, and then weathering it afterwards.

Thanks for the advice

I obviously have some experimenting ahead of me. My color theory books say yellow + red + blue gives brown (i.e. the sludge at the bottom of the rinse water) and green is yellow + blue, so all of these approaches are possible. I did sand the floor, but the stripwood is scale one inch, so sanding is not an option.

The green lacquer trick would work, because lacquer is transparent-- green lacquer would absorb some of the red, like a camera filter. Unfortunately that would be too posh a finish.

On another page, my mixing book shows how to push browns like umber toward red. So I'll try some redish brown stains. There are some good lumberyards in town, so I'll see what I can find.

pqe

(**edited in the afternoon to say what I meant to say in the early morning.)

Thanks for the lesson on how not to do ...

Sometimes, observing someone's mistakes also makes a good learning experience. Lesson learned: Avoid red wood stain.  Thanks for sharing.

San Lorenzo to the rescue!

That's the name of our local lumber yard. It was acquired by a national chain, who changed the name and some operations, but the revenue went downhill so fast, they put it back the way it was. My town has a history of that sort of thing happening.

Anyway, they have an excellent stock of wood stains, although the smallest you can get is a 1/2 pt. I perused their sample chips and picked two that looked promising; Minwax Red Oak and Sedona Red.

I discovered I get a truer color out of my Sony camera just by using a neutral grey background. (There must be some optimization going on in the background I need to figure out how to turn off.) The center strip is the color I've been complaining about, just a bit too red for my taste. The sample stains are two dips about two hours apart. I wiped excess stain after 30 seconds. The oak is too dark-- I can lighten it by wiping sooner, but it still accentuates the grain too much. I like the Sedona, but I think one dip will be enough. This one is just a little darker than the wood in my closet.

So, I'm off to make a mess of my hands again.

pqe

Very cool

nice work and patience 

Some hours later....

So here is my staining line:

Under the environmental rules promulgated by she who must be obeyed, all stinky operations are done outdoors. Minwax is an oil based stain, here I am on my deck staining away. The process is to soak the piece in stain, let it sit a bit (wet strips are parked on the container lid to my right, by the glass of water), then wipe the excess off:

Darkness is loosely determined by the amount of time the piece soaks before wiping, but it varies a lot from piece to piece. (That's the point of board by board construction, really. If I wanted everything exactly the same color, I'd use paint.)

Here are the results:

(My camera is still trying to make things brighter than they are-- this image is adjusted to match what I am seeing.) This may not be the exact color of redwood (most redwood is sort of orange) but this is a color that signifies redwood to me.

I also painted some stain directly on the model floor:

The plywood interior floor is not half bad, although you can see the flame if you are looking for it. I'll add a bunch of clutter to hide that. The color of the saw case is much better, and all of the purple is gone. The outside planking is not quite right, but that will get some grey paint before I'm done.

Now I can start building walls.

pqe

Very nice job so far. That

Very nice job so far. That equipment is also looking great. I love these craftsman kits. I have a few of them on my layout and they are tedious to put together but well worth it in the end. Keep up the good work.

Fire retardant paint.

I seem to remember some wood structures being painted in a fire retardant paint that made the structure as red as your efforts.  I have seen photos of these.  They are out there.

Den

Put on the classical station, it's time for Te Deum

(Musician's joke) The thing about building a board by board kit is it takes a long time to put all of those little boards on. A bit of music helps-- my station of choice is WQXR (unless they are playing opera).

Here's my bench setup for assembling walls:

I've long wondered about the magnetic assembly jig that Micro-Mark sells, but I've put off buying one because-- well, if I bought everything I like in the Micro-Mart catalog, I'd be in serious trouble with the financial department. However, I saw a close-up of the jig in a recent post here, and thought, "gee, those look a lot like cabinet latches to me." So I dropped by Home Depot and bought a 12" x 12" piece of steel ($3.00) and a dozen of their cheapest cabinet locks (0.89 ea), from which I extracted the magnets. This gives me twice the working area of the Micro-Mark product-- the only advantage of theirs is it's a box and so will stay square-- my flat steel has a slight warp, which I took care of by screwing it to my bench.

The kit instructions suggest covering the drawings with a sheet of mylar (printer transperancy) instead of the traditional wax paper. That works for me, as I can't see through wax paper all that well. They also suggest gluing the first piece to the mylar-- I opted for a bit of double stick scotch tape instead, but most of the joints do get glued down a bit.

(You may wonder about the papers dangling down-- I don't have enough space to lay instructions flat, so I hang them over my tool collection using clothes pins on a loop of wire:

It's awkward but workable.)

Here's the start of assembly of the west wall:

Every piece is cut, glued and placed over the drawing. You can see that some pieces need to be cut at an angle:

I like this new miter box from midwest products. It has more angles than the old standby, and a neat cam system for locking parts in place. The slots are sized for a razor saw, but trying to saw scale 1" lumber makes a mess. Instead, I'm using a razor blade with the back ground off. I clamped a bit of plastic as a stop so I could cut a batch of these angle braces.

Here they are in the finished framework:

The magnets held everything together nicely. They can be used like weights to maintain position, or they can be slid sideways to put pressure on a joint. I'm pretty sure I can combine them with my Legos when I need to built square walls.

With the framework built and dry, it's time to apply siding:

I used a magnet as a guide to keep the tops of each piece aligned (the bottoms are supposed to be uneven.) Thirty boards later:

I cut the siding boards on my chopper so the ends would be square, but instead of using a guide for length, I stuck down a paper label with marks for the maximum and minimum. If gluing the siding boards wasn't tedious enough, the next step is a batten for every seam. That's a three step process:

1. Align the square next to a seam and glue up the stick:

I do this while looking through a magnifier-- I've tried to duplicate my view in these photos.

2. Place the stick along the square. (That square is from Micro-mark, one of the best purchases I've made from them.)

3. Clean up excess glue. This is Aleene's Quick Dry Tacky Glue. I've got about 5 minutes to clean it off, but the sooner the better.

Nothing beats the good ol' toothpick for this, although I cut a chisel point on it. I chopped all of the battens to match the longest board, and will trim them later (although in the process of setting up this photo, I apparently grabbed a short one.) 

Here's the finished wall, detached from the mylar, battens trimmed, and excess glue removed from the back. (about 20 minutes work with a dental tool.)

Total time to build this piece was about 6 hours. There are three sides and a roof to go, so it will be a few days before the next update.

Thanks for looking,

pqe

Thank you for the great

Thank you for the great update. Everything is looking real good so far.

More walls

This is an L-shaped building, so there are six walls. Three happen to be on the same page, so I can combine assembly steps. Here, I'm putting the wide sheathing (scale 1"x16") boards on:

Some of the boards need to be trimmed to fit the gable, and that lower left assembly gets windows. Cutting thin material requires a very sharp blade. Xacto blades are sharp enough out of the package, but they soon loose their edge. To keep the budget from breaking, I re-sharpen them. This is a two step process:

First draw the blade on a fine stone. Use circular strokes, pushing into the edge and lifting on the return stroke. It takes practice to learn the angle, but you can tell how you are doing by looking for the shiny part of the edge. It should be fairly wide and parallel to the edge. About ten strokes on each side usually is enough. Eventually the edge will start to curve-- that's when you need a new blade.

To finish the edge, strop the blade on a leather strop. Use a pulling motion away from the edge, holding the blade at the same angle. I find a  combination stone with leather on the back really handy for the process. I can't fnd any for sale but you can easily make your own out of commercially available products. (I got mine from Brookstone when they were still a tool company.)

After trimming, I clean up the edge with some fine sanding film. I use a NWSL Detail sander, or some film glued to a bit of wood:

This is a fancy one, made with a piece of adhesive backed ply (left over from the engine house build) glued to a toothpick. It does a good job in the corners.

The windows are old school, just a piece of acetate with muntins (mullions?) printed on. I have departed from the instructions a bit here- they specify putting the acetate on the studs before the sheeting, but it seems that would A) make the sheathing boards uneven andb) make it much more difficult to fit the boards. So I put the sheathing on first, as you can see.

I rough cut the acetate before gluing​ it on, then trimmed it to hide under the molding:

I then cut the casing in the miter box:

If you use a stop to cut both top pieces, then both side pieces, the casing will be nice and square:

I used thicker wood than specified (2" x 4" instead of 1"x 4") to give a little extra depth.

Next up, more 1"x4" battens:

I couldn't use a square to line the battens up, so I cut a spacer to keep them straight. Any errors will accumulate when you do it this way, but crooked battens are easily visible against the edges of the 1" x 16"s.

Finally, the walls were ready to put together:

To keep things square, I brought the Legos out:

As I thought, the magnets helped keep pressure on the drying glue joints. I could even use a wedge to put extra pressure in a critical spot:

So, after five days, (maybe 30 hours) of work, the model is beginning to look like a building.

I'm really starting to like that color. Maybe it's a version of Stockholm syndrome from looking at it so intently for a week, but I'm getting reluctant about weathering the outside. We'll see.

Thanks for looking.

pqe

 "90 year old redwood, still

It's hard to tell from a photo but the grain on that wall looks a lot like Doug fir.    There was still a few small mills operating around here when  was a kid,  the valley where Roaring camp is today always had a sweet smelling smoke haze from the slash burners. If you can't find small cans of stain in the color you are looking for you might try diluted craft paint, I use it on flatcar decks,etc.? .......DaveB 

Lego with magnets

This step-by-step guide with photos is terrific.  I imagine it takes a lot of time.  Thank you.

Your use of Lego and magnets reminded me of a trick a friend of mine showed me that I use:  Take a 2x2 Lego block and carefully drill out the circle piece on the bottom (not going all the way through).  You can then fit a couple of small rare-earth magnets in and fill with some epoxy.  After set, the brick won't stack *on* another brick, but other bricks will stack on top of it just fine.  And, it will hold to the metal plate well.  I build a few bracing structures (including the necessary right angles) with some of these magnet blocks on the bottom and use them for holding while the glue sets.

Lego-mags

@cshelton- yeah, I had been thinking about that. I'm glad to hear it works.

@DaveB- Actually, I think the boards on the left might be cedar--that's the back of a linen closet. The house has been hacked and remodeled many times, so I'm sure there's Doug fir in the mix. Whatever it's made of, this is the color I am lusting after :

I'm pretty sure the beams and lathes are old growth redwood. This part of the house was built around 1920. I need to build a lot of outbuildings and platforms for the mill area, so I'll see what I can whip up out of my Windsor and Newton paint set.

pqe

"I'm pretty sure the beams

    Yeah, They liked redwood lath, probably due to it's rot resistance in contact with plaster . Most vintage houses around here used redwood framing but I've seen a few with Douglas fir here and there in the structure. Although they both surface discolor removing a thin slice from the surface will show the true color inside. Redwood is softer than fir too so a probe with a sharp point might be a clue. It would be handy to see some color photos of the old mills to see if they applied any finish over the years, I guess whitewash would be the only thing obvious in a normal B&W photo.........DaveB 

Details

I've spent the last month working on the sawmill interior details. Progress has been slow-- some days all that got done was a single drop of glue. Other days saw a regression as I decided some sections weren't up to scratch. Very little of this detail will be visible once the roof is on (especially since the sawmill will be at the back of the current layout) but it may show in a future version.

The first chore was a couple of interior walls:

The walls are boards over frames, just like the outer structure, but I found the small pieces involved more difficult to manage. There wasn't enough room to hold everything together with the magnets, so I supplemented the magnets with small nails. The round nails work, but aren't the last word in control. For the next project I'll see if I can find some flat strips of iron about the same size.

The kit includes some machinery in addition to the main saw-- a big planer and a crosscut saw to trim the board ends. The planer is a lovely casting, with intricate belt work:

This is assembled from about 6 parts, with the belts made of bond paper strips.

The design for the crosscut was really a bit skimpy, just a frame of 2x6s with a belt in the middle. I tried to make it their way about six times, but it kept folding up on me- finally I built a version with beefed up ends:

The kit also includes a casting for the log carrier. This wasn't the best casting in the world, as there was a break in the main drive rod and some of the wheels are just blobs. The kit idea of a dog (that's the part that grabs the log) was just a 4x4 with a bent wire in it. To be fair, this is an HO version of a kit developed for O scale, and the castings in the O version are much more detailed. Anyway, with a bit of research I found a typical dog and tried to duplicate that look:

I'll probably mount a half cut log on it.

Since this is a steam driven plant, all of the machines are powered by belts from an overhead line shaft. The kit just supplied some 1/8" dowel to hang the belts from, as this stuff is all hidden in the rafters, but I took a notion to build something a bit more convincing. So I started making shafts and pulleys:

This is my "poor man's lathe" a bench motor acquired in my flute building days. It turns at a relatively sedate 1725 rpm and has a high end chuck with a custom made hand brake. It's pedal operated, so I can pulse the power when I want slow speed. The nicest feature is it has a hollow shaft, so I can insert long pieces of stock. It's perfect for most grinding and drilling jobs and I can even turn plastic or brass with jeweler's files as shown. The stock I am using is plastic coated wire with one or two layers of styrene tube AC glued on. It's very little work to make a shaft with a couple of pulleys like this:

I turned some assemblies as a unit, but I discovered it was best to cut all the way down to the wire and loosen the pulleys so I could adjust the spacing.

Here's a view of the shaft system:

I sort of freelanced the right angle drive, as I couldn't find a clear picture of the real thing. Maybe when I get a 3D printer I'll make gears with teeth.

Making the shafts and pulleys is easy-- the tricky bit is stringing the belts. The belt you see above is painted bond paper, which is all right, but I found something better in my supplies stock-- cedar shingle paper from RSLaserkits. (I bought some spare when it looked like my engine house build was going off the rails.) The page includes some strips of unnotched paper to make cap shingles. I cut this into thin strips to make my belts.

There are a couple in place just left of the smokestack-- to my eye they look like fresh leather. To string the belts I borrowed a technique from rigging model ships. I threaded the material behind a pair of pulleys and used weights to keep it tight while the glue dries. Note that this required turning the model into some unusual positions. After twenty minutes or so, flip the belt over the other side and glue again:

This is a good use for some itty bitty clothespins I found at a craft shop. It's delicate work-- I used my bodkins (sewing needle in a stick) to apply glue and push the belts into place.

Here is the result of a month's effort:

Next up: a roof. I can't decide whether to build the board and batten roof design supplied with the kit or make a nice shingle roof with those cedar shingles. Maybe I'll try both.

pqe