Finally fiinishing up construction of a Southern sawmill. I have several brands of lumber stacks but, then I got to thinking. What color or colors do you use to simulate a stack of fresh cut lumber? Please share your ideas.
I cut stripwood into suitable lengths using a Chopper. It’s already the appropriate color for fresh cut wood.
There will be some natural variance in color depending on the type of wood – pine, redwood, cedar, poplar, etc. all have distinctive coloration.
Sawmill in Mississippi
South Carolina
http://www.wolfcreeksawmill.com/Pages/default.aspx
Georgia
http://www.timbermen.net/photo-gallery/johnston-lumber-mill.html
Color of fresh-cut railroad ties, and freshly creosoted ones, too!
http://www.shorpy.com/node/7900?size=_original#caption
I’ve used D&RGW Depot Buff and lighten it with a bit of Reefer White sometimes if I need to paint plastic to simulate new pine or oak.
Interesting! Ed
I painted mine an off-white, added a few orangish knots, then dry-brushed with a couple shades of yellow. Different woods can be different colours, depending on the species. Most dimensional lumber is spruce/pine/fir, which is what I was attempting to depict here. Mine is strip styrene:
Real wood is okay for simulating some species, but in many cases, the grain doesn’t look right:
Wayne
You can simulate wood with plastic; or, you could even use real wood, which has a sort of woodish color to it. [;)]
Wayne-
First - thanks for answering my question. I know what fresh cut pine, hardwood, etc looks like - I was trying to figure out the paint colors to use to simulate the wood. I will definitly take your lead.
Kudos on your layout! It looks great and I love the attention to detail - I can almost smell the fresh lumber.
I painted mine an off-white, added a few orangish knots, then dry-brushed with a couple shades of yellow. Different woods can be different colours, depending on the species. Most dimensional lumber is spruce/pine/fir, which is what I was attempting to depict here. Mine is strip styrene:
Real wood is okay for simulating some species, but in many cases, the grain doesn’t look right:
Wayne
Thanks for the suggestion Ed - I will try those colors
There’s nothing like the smell of the basement when I’m starting a new section of benchwork. Sometimes, I just fire up the table saw to run a piece of wood through to give the place that “just right” smell.
One of our Club members makes the best looking Lumber stacks/load with REAL wood.
They take the real thin plywood from Noreth East Wood or Midwest and cut them into strips and then into stacks with the ends slightly misalignes, just as the real wood piles are. Band them together and glue a few stringers and separators boards sticking up between the lumber loads.
Can’t get much more real wood looking.
Same as for amy sawmill scene (a 4 x 2 foot area with noting but log piles.
Every spring I do some tree trimming and I take the branches and cut them up into proper scale lenght logs and super glue them into piles or loads for pulpwood or log loads for trucks.
And the branch logs have real looking groth rings just like the real trees have. Can’t get much more realistic than that.
It takes a LOT of twigs and branches to cover a sawmill scene of 8 sq ft!
BOB H - Clarion, PA
Is your club layout set pre 1980s? From what I can tell, lumber stacks since then (and perhaps before) come from the mills aligned pretty darn aligned - example (which looks way too neat even). Of course, in retail centers the boards become misaligned due to customers picking thru them for the best pieces. Those nice square stacks in that image remind me of an old MR article - “Stack by Stack, Not Board By Board” from Oct 1982 - where the author cuts thin wood veneer into rectangles, glues a number of layers together, scores the ends to simulate indvidual board ends, and adds a layer of individual boards at the top, the idea being this is a lot faster to build up lots of lumber stacks for mills and yards, then gluing individual sticks together to form the stacks. I made a few stacks like this…decades ago, they turned out OK, but I haven’t seen them in ages.
BTW, speaking of stuff from the past, anyone remember why the Atlas lumber stacks had such weird gaps between boards, so that they ended up looking more like piles of long iron ingots then actual lumber? Even in the 1960s surely they could have molded them better.
[quote user=“chutton01”]
cmrproducts
One of our Club members makes the best looking Lumber stacks/load with REAL wood.They take the real thin plywood from Noreth East Wood or Midwest and cut them into strips and then into stacks with the ends slightly misalignes, just as the real wood piles are. Band them together and glue a few stringers and separators boards sticking up between the lumber loads.
Is your club layout set pre 1980s? From what I can tell, lumber stacks since then (and perhaps before) come from the mills aligned pretty darn aligned - example (which looks way too neat even). Of course, in retail centers the boards become misaligned due to customers picking thru them for the best pieces. Those nice square stacks in that image remind me of an old MR article - “Stack by Stack, Not Board By Board” from Oct 1982 - where the author cuts thin wood veneer into rectangles, glues a number of layers together, scores the ends to simulate indvidual board ends, and adds a layer of individual boards at the top, the idea being this is a lot faster to build up lots of lumber stacks for mills and yards, then gluing individual sticks together to form the stacks. I made a few stacks like this…decades ago, they turned out OK, but I haven’t seen them in ages.
BTW, speaking of stuff from the past, anyone remember why the Atlas lumber stacks
For some reason I was thinking only of loading docks or storage areas of a sawmill, with nicely squared-up lumber stacks ready for shipping (either banded or wrapped), not intermediate processing steps - yes, I can see roughly “human”-aligned stacks during processing. Still, the stack-by-stack modeling method may work best if you’re modeling dozens (or hundreds) of lumber stacks on the loading dock ready for shipment.
In my time frame - the Lumber companies were just starting to ship lumber in centerbeam cars - some unwrapped yet.
As for my loads I mentioned the ends of the loads are fairly even but one can see that it appears that there are individual boards in the loads eventhough they are thin slabs of plywood.
Remember this is HO and the plys of this micro plywood are realy thin - so one has to really look closely at these wood stacks I am using!
I run a lot of Thrall door cars and the doors are shut so no one knows what is inside.
Bob, when you talk about North East Wood… Did you mean Northeastern Scale Lumber? They have ultra thin birch plywood sheets which I think you are referring to - and interestingly their 1/64" thickness is too thin to represent nominal 2"x4" lumber (which is smaller anyway in the real world - more like 1.5 x 3.5 inches (about 0.02 inches in scale). Still, those sheets definitely could be used for the ‘stack by stack’ method, as well as neatly cutting them up in scale 4ft x 8ft lengths to represent plywood sheets.
YES that was the company I was thinking about but the keyboard would not respond properly! 
BOB H - Clarion, PA
I spent 13 years working in a lumber mill east of Bob H. The color of wood is determined by the species of tree it comes from. Soft wood…pine, hemlock, spruce…will have that off whitish color. Some hardwoods are also whitish…maple, ash, poplar, beech, white oak. Red oak has a dark tint to it. Cherry has a reddish brown tint. Walnut is different shades of a deep brown.
Lumber piles (stacks) can vary in what they look like. I worked in a hardwood lumber mill. Our piles were sorted according to the National Hardwood Lumber Association grading criteria. Back then, all FAS and Select had to be at least 8 feet long. First and seconds could be shorter than 8 feet, but the way we piled lumber was a course of 8 footers across the bottoms, up both edges, and across the top. Everything shorter than 8 foot was in the center of the pile. The rest of our stacks were 10 footers and 9 footers- 9’s in the center. 12 footers and 11 footers- 11’s in the center. 14’s and 13’s- 13’s in center. 16’s and 15’s- 15’s in center. These were then shipped to the kilns. After drying they were end trimmed again and that is where you get your 8’, 10’, 12’, and 16’ lumber (the nice neat stacks). Those short under 8 foot pieces become that hobby craft hardwood you buy in small pieces at Lowe’s and Home Depot and such.
Thicknesses are also scaled differently. When you go buy lumber, you get a 1x6x8. That is the nominal size. Actual size is 3/4" x 5 1/2" x 96". In the sawmill, when we cut lumber for a 1x whatever, it is either 4/4 or 5/4 (four quarter or five quarter). This allows for shrinkage in drying and also for planing or sanding to final thickness. We used to cut 12/4 (twelve quarter) white oak. It’s actual size was 3 1/4" thick and HEAVY! White oak is usually stickered between layers so that it does not stain. It stains easily and is this purplish/black stain. The majority of the 12/4 white oak that we cut was sent to Greece…for some odd r
Bob-
I have the same idea - would love to see a few shots of your sawmill-
Way overthinking this, I started with the idea that lumber runs in the beige-tan-yellow-light brown spectrum. Then I realized that, yep, there is reddish/brown lumber. Then I realized futher that treated lumber can have a light greenish tone. Then I searched around on the web, and found that there is no industry-wide standard for those red/green/blue etc colors painted on the ends of boards (not as common today as I remember it being even in the 1990s). I guess there is no (natural or treated - not painted) bluish lumber… what am I saying, of course there is.
I realized that since I will be modeling a modern era lumber distributor who recieves product via rail/truck, and ships out locally, I can get away with the nice square lumber stacks that I like, in light tan or pale yellow colors with some light tan/brown drybrushing - most people viewing the modules will recognize that as lumber without a second thought.
OTOH, I’m afraid those modeling saw mills will need to consider the type of trees “harvested” in their region, and image search for the type of lumber those trees yield. Then try a few coloring samples (with craft paint for cost reasons) on test samples (not front-of-layout details), and go from there. I guess that’s standard practice for anything in this hobby nowadays.
I use raw and burnt sienna drawing ink to stain wood primered white to get a non uniform “new” wood look:
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Harold