An irregular series on construction of an HO bandsaw mill from an old Keystone Locomotive Works kit:
Can it be a month since my last update on this project? I have been working on the sawmill, but did lose a long weekend to go visit my son in Kitty Hawk and another long weekend to go the the Great Scale Model RR Show in Timonium where I “recruited” some workers who will be employed by the mill. All of the major interior machinery is now complete and installed. The edgers were the last items on the instruction sheet, and perhaps they were placed there for a reason. There were thirteen (13!) separate little rollers or axels that had to affixed to one side of the edger and then lined up for attaching the other side. It was somewhat intense. These later machinery stages of building the actual bandsaws and the edgers had a slow pace, as there were steps where one piece had to be glued or painted and then one had to wait for that piece to dry before doing the next step.
I have not yet attached the log carriages to the tracks beside the bandsaws, as they are rather delicate and I am having to put the building on it’s side to attach the siding. Here’s the main sawmill work floor:
Cutting the holes in the siding for the 32 side windows and then cutting 64 pieces of acetate for the “glass” of those 32 windows may be the most tedious part of the kit.
Completing the machinery has presented several issues, and I wonder if I’m the only one that gets “tied up” with such things. For example: (1) On most sawmills, the powerhouse would be located beside the mill. I am working with a narrow shelf, however, and the powerhouse will need to be placed at the outflow end of the mill. That placement would then dictate how the main driv
Some very nice work Bill, as far as the logs on your cars being longer, I doubt that most would question the length, possibly assume the log was bucked after it was unloaded. You know the length of the carriage does not dictate the log length? Most of the time the logs overhang the carriages, and in your example it would only be 2’ on each end.
!(http://www.littleriverrailroad.org/images/Log Jam/ForestrySawmill-17.jpg)
Thanks for the photos, Geared. Nice detail of a carriage shown. I had put in a light wash of rust on mine based on the primarily black & white photos I had seen. With the logs coming up from the pond wet, a rust patina would be standard on much of the machinery on that end of the mill.
For the Keystone mill, it is not the length of the carriage, but rather the “run” of the carriage. I have not yet installed the shotgun piston connecting to the carriage. That and other details such as workers, freshly cut timbers, and scrap such as bark will be added once the basic construction is done. With the bandsaw in place, however, I can see that the most that the carriage would be able to run past the saw blade before the shotgun cylinder would be fully retracted would be about 16’. Not a big problem, but my log loads on the log cars are glued and chained together, so I don’t want to re-saw them to match. (A five-finger “sky hook” occasionally appears above the layout and moves a load of logs from the log dump back up to the log loading area in the woods where the empty log buggies have just been spotted.)
Oh, another observation from cutting all of those windows: milled siding pieces that have been sitting in a drawer for over 30 years can be a little dry and prone to splitting. Thus a reminder to those assembling an older wood kit: work slowly, always use a fresh xacto blade, and use masking tape on the back when cutting the especially delicate places.
Bill