Building the Barbose Mining Co. Stamp Mill - Main Building - Part 1

We start with the assembly of the main structure. This is a straightforward assembly, six pieces that make up the sides along with a dormer section with three pieces. This dormer section would cause me problems later. A little foretaste of things to come.

Next its time to apply the bracing. There are two long pieces, long enough to brace the top of the longest wall. After that its just a matter of working your way around the edges. Don’t waste any of your 5/32” square bracing wood use only what’s necessary. Short pieces will come in handy later. While the instructions are good at describing the bracing for the main structure the dormer section is a bit on the light side and this would bite me later.

Each side consists of pieces that have to be glued together. There are two pieces labeled joint supports that are glued across this joint to them together.

Why does this brace extend across both pieces? As mentioned above it help keeps the wall from flexing.

Trying to keep everything square while the back wall is glued to one of the sides.

Examining the photos in the booklet there appears to be quite a bit more bracing than what the instructions might call for. You may or may not need this extra bracing. The type of finish you are considering for the outside will determine if you need more bracing (there is literally no spare bracing in the kit, so this is out of your own stock. I didn't feel the need for extra bracing in this area. Time will tell). The basswood used for the main structure is thin so it is going to warp if you are going to use a finish that has a lot of water in it. Keep that in mind and apply more bracing if your finishing/weathering could potentially warp the building.

You will also need to add bracing for the dormer section. Beware there are critical dimensions here. The instructions have been pretty good to this point. It does a good job of showing the bracing for front wall of the dormer but glosses over the bracing for the two side walls. There is a picture and it appears that you don't need to add much bracing to the sides. Don't believe the picture! At the very least the bracing for the top of both side walls should run the entire length of the wall. Don't worry about cutting the angle at this point. Just make sure the brace extends a bit beyond the top corner. Once the glue has setup you can you use the bottom edge of the side wall as a guide to trim the brace to the correct angle. The other critical element is the roof rafter that the dormer section rests on. This fit is critical, to short and the walls will bend in slightly. To wide and the walls will bulge out. You are looking for a snug fit, that also has room for glue. Do not attach the dormer wall to the rafter until you have a good fit and then cut six of them to the same length. One is for the dormer rafter support and the others are your rafters to be installed a bit later.

Once you have finished with the bracing, assemble the walls and do your best to keep things square. Keeping things square is important with something this size. There is mention of an optional tailings house addition that could replace one of the two large freight doors. I didn’t find anything like this on their website but the concept stuck in my head so I left both the large freight doors off. I’ll install them much later in the process, probably when I’m down to final details. I’m going to run a track from the freight door on the office side of the building to the tailings dump.

The main structure has been glued together and the dormer section is in place. What's missing is the extra rafter at the peak and the four other rafters called for in the booklet.

Now you are coming to the part that had me scratching my head a bit and I reached out to Foggy Mountain for clarification. The response was prompt and cleared things up quite a bit. The confusion came from the fact that there is not a diagram or good picture of where to install the roof rafters. As you can see in the last two photos I have installed the dormer section. Before you do this follow these steps:

1) When gluing the dormer to its rafter (this happens before you install it on the main structure) do your best to make sure its centered. I scratched my head a bit and did my best but mine is a tad bit off center. The easiest way to do this, which is not what I did, is to find the center of the dormer front wall and make a mark on the bottom of the wall at this center point. Then find the center of the dormer rafter and make a mark there. Then you can glue them together and line up the marks and you should be pretty darn close to even on both sides.

2) Take one rafter to be the roof peak. Draw a line down the length of the rafter 1/16th of an inch down from the edge that will form the peak of the roof. 

3) Glue another rafter to the front edge the roof peak rafter. You don't need this for strength but you will need it to provide enough area to glue the top of the dormer side walls to. I didn't add this second piece till later after I had broke the glue joints...twice. With the bracing extending to the top of the dormer wall and the extra width provided by the second peak rafter you have enough surface area for a good glue joint (that you can actually get a clamp on).

4) Install the combined roof peak rafters in place first, remember to keep the line you drew at the top, that's important for the roof to fit correctly later. One of the issues with this install is you are gluing end grain to edge grain which, inherently, is a weak joint (glue doesn't penetrate the end grain as well as it does edge grain).

5) Now you can install the dormer section. Don't panic during this install. The line you drew on the roof will determine the location of the dormer rafter. The sharp edge of the dormer side wall should touch this line. [Once you know the approximate position of the dormer rafter you could add the other two roof supports at this stage rather than waiting to install them all at once.] Use that line to determine where the dormer rafter needs to sit. The dormer rafter is going to be 45 degrees off from the wall brace you are attaching to so it looks a little odd, but its only job is to support the dormer wall rather than the roof.

6) Now we come to the vague instruction of installing the other four roof rafters with no real instructions or pictures of where. This is what I did after my email with Foggy Mountain. The first rafter was installed halfway between the front wall and the dormer rafter. I installed two rafters under the dormer walls, more or less, equally between the roof peak rafter and the front dormer wall. The last one went halfway between the back wall and the roof peak. I'm not sure you actually need this one but at the very least it will stop any sagging.

All the roof rafters, with the exception of the dormer support, should be flush with the bracing on the side walls

Yes, the inside has been painted black to make sure light doesn't make the walls "glow" when the lights are on. I'm sure I'll be finding light leaks all over the place but black is the start.

At this point you are done with the main building structure. The only things left undone are the rear door, where the ore comes in, and the two freight doors at the bottom. I want to leave myself some options and these doors can easily be added later if I need them.

This is how I ended up before I started making modifications to better support the dormer sides at the roof peak.

Building the Barbose Mining Co. Stamp Mill - Getting Started

The Barbose Mining Co. Stamp Mill Build

Part 1

The Barbose Mining Co Stamp Mill is a craftsman structure kit from Foggy Mountain Models. I ran across it while looking for a small stamp mill kit for my future Colorado & Northwestern model railroad. It has the classic stamp mill look without being identical to other stamp mill kits that are out there. It promises to be quite a different build from the Stoney Creek Design kits I have been working on.

I have a couple of objectives for this build. I want to install lighting right from the beginning. Based on what I see, I’m fairly certain that I will be able to access the interior in the future if an LED actual goes out so I can secure the roof in place rather than making it removable (although there are two roofs on the main structure so, in theory, one could be removable if really needed), a partial stone foundation. That foundation is not part of the kit itself and falls more on the scenery side but it has to be considered as the build goes forward.

Step one, read the instructions! Seriously! Cover to cover! Before you cut any strip wood or cut a wall section out of the frets read the instructions. Instructions are hard to write and these instructions are okay but there are a few things that were glossed over. Identify them now and think your way through them before you get frustrated while trying to glue a joint together.

Step two, double check that you have everything that is supposed to be in the kit. I did this sort of. You really need to examine what you get. For instance, the back freight door requires two u-shaped channels to serve as tracks for it to slide on. I received one u-shaped one and one z-shaped one. I didn’t realize this till I got to that step so I’m going to wing it rather than try and get another u channel from Foggy Mountain. This kit uses a large amount of 5/32” square strip wood for bracing. You should receive 25 pieces of this in the kit and I didn’t count what came in the kit. After I framed in the office and the boiler room I was running short of bracing!

Step three, things that are not included. The one that strikes me as odd is the kit does not include the NBW castings. Granted you only need these for Ore bins but it did mean I needed to order them (I didn't have any on hand, must have gone into another build at some point) from San Juan Details (or Tichy Trains which ever you prefer). I also ordered more 5/32” square wood from Northeastern Scale Lumber. In fact I ordered 10 2’ long pieces. At this point I have (close to finishing anything that needs bracing) used 9 of those extra pieces.

That’s our starting point, tune in for more posts on this build.

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Replicating Colorado High Country Weathered Wood Colors

A little background before I dive into this. I have made a conscious effort to reduce the magazine back issue population around the house. The ones I do hang on to are the NGSL Gazette (6 times a year), Model Railroad Planning (annual) and the On30 and HOn3 Annuals. I probably have less than a dozen issues of other magazines. I tend to periodically work my way through all the annuals and I often find small articles that I forgot about that pique my interest again.

I’m reaching the point on my current build that I need to seriously think about painting and weathering so I started flipping through my collection of On30 Annuals. Something was tickling the back of my mind about weathering wood in Colorado. I had flipped through 8 issues when I found an article in the 2014 On30 Annual; Knotty & Nice, Weathering Wood Structures by Jim Ellis. This article isn’t about how to get the silvery grey color, it is about replicating the brown/orange color often seen in the Colorado high country. Normally I would go to my standard peeling paint weathering, but the current build is a mining structure and it is a 50/50 shot if it was painted or unpainted. The article was very intriguing, so I had some alcohol markers already and ordered the rest.

Up to this point I have only completed one build with unpainted wood sides and in that instance I went with the silvery grey weathering recommended in the kit instructions, so I already had experience using alcohol based markers (4 versions of grey). I think it turned out pretty good, there are some nice tonal variations and it was easy to accomplish with the markers and then a quick wash with Weather All (out of production, but there are a more than a few versions of it on the market) to blend it together a bit. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

What I really want to replicate are the colors you see in these pictures: 

The Yankee Girl Mine in southwest Colorado. Note that the planked roof surfaces have weathered to the classis silver grey while the vertical components vary from grey through brown to orange.

This pic is from the opposite side under different lighting conditions. Here the orange appears more like a much light brown, almost tan.

Same side direct sunlight, the orange is far more visible in this light, looks like early morning based on the shadows.

This looks like more of an early afternoon, late morning shot. The orange is definitely visible.

So, we are looking to create a mix of browns and orange (of all things) along with areas of silver grey. I decided that this technique needed some practice before I tried it out on the model. In the article Jim Ellis, essentially, uses five or six different Prismacolor markers to make rapid streaks on the wood. Here’s the process:

1.      Using double sided tape, stick the individual strips down tight against each other. You can also apply this to a piece of “sheet” (plank?) wood (which you could later cut down to individual strips or whatever you need).

2.      To provide a base, in my case the Weather All, apply the product to the wood, as “primer” coat. Let this dry (you can do multiple coats to get the base color you like).

3.      Using the alcohol based markers rapidly make random streaks down the wood (working with the grain). Alcohol markers dry fast so speed is key, you are trying to blend the colors together at least to a certain extent.

4.      Once the alcohol has dried (probably seconds) apply another generous amount of your silver weathering mix again. This will help blend the colors together. Once this has dried your, wood is ready to go.

Pretty straight forward, the article goes into a lot more detail including adding knots and wood rot at the bottom. I checked the White River Productions web site and 2014 issue is not available. I did see a few copies available on eBay so try there for the full article.

The Experiment Begins

First, I didn’t use the Prismacolor alcohol markers. I already had Copic Sketch alcohol markers (I purchased mine from Dick Blick) on hand, recommended by Roger Malinowski for one of the Stoney Creek Designs kits that I built. I added one more from Angel Craft from a small set of 12 markers I picked up on sale at Homegoods. These are all dual ended markers, a wider chip style tip on one end and a narrower pointed tip on the other.

I pulled out a handful of coffee stirrers and taped them (with double sided tape) to a piece of foamed PVC. I applied a couple of coats of Weather All, mostly because it didn’t penetrate the coffee stirrers very well (it is some kind of hardwood). After that dried, I followed the directions and applied random streaks of color as quickly as possible. I also kept some Isopropyl alcohol handy and used that and an old brush to scrub at the colors to try and blend them together better (limited success with that). Once dry (a minute maybe, the benefit of living in a high dry climate) I applied another coat of Weather All. The end effect was okay.

First set of coffee stirrers. To much red from one of the markers and some harsh transitions between some of the colors. Apparently I'm not good at making streaks either. I was using the bigger chip end of the marker.

Just to experiment, I pulled out another batch of coffee stirrers and repeated the sequence but did not apply the initial “primer” coat of Weather All. Again, the end result was okay. At this point I was leaning away from this really working.

Initially I didn't think this was working very well, but looking at this I can start to see the colors "blending" as I went back over the top. This is the happy accident that I talk about farther down.

Next step was to try it out on the basswood that the structure is really made from; basswood. The exterior of this structure is board & batten basswood (representing 6” planks in O scale, and really tiny battens). I also wanted to try layering the markers rather than going with random streaks. When you look at buildings with this type of weathering there are some definite patterns to the weathering. The bulk of the color tends toward the darker brown colors, as you move towards more sunlight you start to see more orange and often in the harshest areas you can see our favorite silver grey color. It probably wouldn’t make a difference on a smaller building but this one is big and the patterns need to make sense.

Like any good modeler I don’t throw anything away (at least right away). I still had the frets that the main walls had come on, so plenty of material to work with. Since I’m still experimenting at this point I repeated the original process with random streaks. I found this a bit difficult with the battens in place. When I applied the second application of Weather All I made sure it worked its way into the edges of the battens. Still not pleased with the effect at this point and at least one of the markers I was using (since I was also experimenting with color at this point) had way to much red in it, a color that definitely does not exist on the prototypes.

I "primed the wood on the right side with the Weather All, and went without on the left side. Again the brown marker with the heavy red element snuck back in.

In one of those happy accident moments, I notice that you could continue to affect the color after it was applied when you ran another marker over the top (I don’t know if this would work with the Prismacolor marker), either the same one which would intensify the color or a different color that helped blend things together. This worked even after the colors were dry (should have tried that much earlier).

At this point I’m was down to what I felt like were the final colors for the structure. I picked out another section of the fret and repeated with my modified process. Now I was starting to get the results and control I was hoping for. Lots of tonal variation and since I could intensify and blend colors by going back over it (much like paint) with the same marker or change the tone by adding another color on top.

A couple of final thoughts. I haven’t tried Prismacolor markers so I don’t know how they would perform as you layer the colors. I really like the Copic markers because the pointed tip is much softer than the Angel Craft pointed tip. The Copic works more like a paint brush. The Angel Craft is much harder like a Sharpie marker and leaves a very distinct line that is harder to blend. I’m going to go back to Dick Blick and see if I can find a similar brown in the Copic line. Take a look at the pictures and let me know if you think I succeeded with the modified technique.

Now a bit of why we see these colors, this is an AI answer mind you. I’m not going any further down the rabbit hole on my own.

In Colorado (and probably in any location that shares similar climates) wood weathers to different colors based on a mix of sun exposure (UV radiation), moisture and the natural resins inside the tree itself. In the dry, high-altitude sun, these elements interact to create colors running from a bleached silver grey to a rich, dark brown with orange streaks.

AI also suggested that the south and west facing walls would tend to bleach to the silver grey while the north and east faces would weather to the brown/orange pattern. Looking at pictures I don’t really feel like this is the case. There are definitely variations based on the sun position but not always as well defined as the AI response insinuated. The one thing I have noticed is that horizontal surfaces almost always bleach to silver grey rather than the brown/orange. Ore bins, regardless of position to the sun, seem to run more towards the silver grey than the brown/orange, although I have certainly seen examples of both and there are pictures of mining structures with the headframes and support buildings in the brown/orange weathering and the bins in silver grey. As they say, you can find an example for almost every situation.

Climate definitely affects this process as does the type of lumber used. A well documented example is Bodie National Park. Those buildings have almost universally weathered to the dark brown color and most lighter colors appear to be variations of brown, while there is some of the orange it is  (check the time of day the photo was taken, I have noticed that shots taken in the early morning or late evening when the sun is low makes the lighter browns look very orange at Bodie) not as prevalent as seen in Colorado. I’m not sure how much altitude makes a difference (other than intensifying the UV exposure); Bodie sits at 8,375 feet and the Yankee Girl sits at 10,600 (so close to the tree line, typically starting about 11000 feet). Having a reference photo or two handy is a important to make sure you have the right colors to work with.

Here are some other examples:

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