[Dwight Ennis]

Yesterday was a dream come true as Eric, Henner, and myself were invited up to tour the remains of the old Santa Cruz Lumber Company sawmill and ROW. I got an email sever months back from a gentleman who apparently stumbled across my web site. That gentleman was Doug Ley, whose grandfather George Ley had organized and built the Santa Cruz Lumber Company and its railroad. Doug and I have been in touch ever since, and yesterday he was kind enough to take the time to show us around.

The mill as it was in 1949...

The sawmill sits in the Santa Cruz Mountains about 7 miles north of the town of Boulder Creek and is reached via a private road. Here was our first glimpse of it...

The mill was torn down and completely rebuilt in 1955. The roof is the saw filers room built atop the new mill. The tall roof at left is the hoist used to raise and lower the blades to and from the main floor - it is directly over the bandsaw. A closer view of the slash burner, also part of the new mill...

At the bottom of the road is the Green Shed, also part of the new mill built in 1955. This is where fresh-cut lumber was loaded on trucks for its trip to the SCLCo Planing Mill, built in Felton about 14 miles south (right next to where Roaring Camp Railroad sits today)...

Approaching the mill, one again sees the slash burner and roof of the blade hoist structure...

This is the first part of the mill proper which we saw. It's an extension housing a log deck that allows logs to be yarded in from the Hot Deck to a holding area aside the log carriage...

Some close-ups of the slash burner...

And the company logo atop it...

This is the front of the mill, today covered over in brush. The log pond and log haul used to be here...

The log deck inside the mill extension, looking towards the carriage...

Looking down the mill towards the sorting area. The carriage would have been on the far side, and the bandsaw sits out of view at right...

The log carriage rode here. You can see the bumper at the end of its travel still in place...

To our astonishment, the bandsaw is still here and escaped the scrapper's torch...

The dead roll on the outfeed side of the bandsaw...

The saw throat...

and the outfeed side...

The floor of the saw filer's room still contains three blades...

This is the blade hoist, and it sits directly over the bandsaw. It's hard to see in this photo, but this could be raised and lowered with a blade draped over it...

Looking up at the hoist, the tall roof visible in the earlier photos...

Looking towards the carriage and log haul from the filer's room on the second story...

The filer's room and blade hoist...

Roof detail of the filer's room...

Roof of the main mill sorting and cutoff area from the filer's room...

And the sorting/cutoff area floor...

The inclined cutoff table is visible in this shot...

Note the wood gussets at each top joint of the main mill roof...

Wall detail of the filer's room...

The inclined cutoff table. A man sat in the small enclosure above the table while boards would ride up the incline on chain/dog conveyors. At the end were gang cutoff saws controlled by the guy in the enclosure. Boards would be cut to length...

Roof detail from below...

Looking back towards the bandsaw. This area would have contained a series of live rolls to carry the cut boards to the cutoff table...

The dual boilers on the lower level...

We were told that the mill had been flooded some years back and a bunch of silt deposited on the lower floor. We couldn't see the fireboxes and assumed they were buried under the silt.

The lower floor, and part of the dam wall that kept water out of the mill's lower floor...

Looking towards the area under the log carriage...

Another part of the dam wall...

Looking out towards the once-upon-a-time log pond...

One of the steam cylinders which formed part of the log kicker above...

A couple more shots of the boilers...

The business side of the bandsaw...

We then rode along the old railroad's right of way. This is some cribbing which forms an abutment for a former log bridge across Pescadaro Creek along which the railroad ran for most of its length...

I've included some detail shots for you sawmill modelers out there. Hope you enjoyed the tour a tenth as much as we did!

For some historical info and photos of the Santa Cruz Lumber Company and its railroad, go to my web site and click on "The Real SCLCo" button.

 

[Gary Armitstead]

Dwight,

Awesome detail photos!. So when are you going to start the model?

 

[vsmith]

Cool, Its amazing its still there almost intact, most places like that would have been demo'd or destroyed by brushfires or vandals long ago, must be well isolated on private property.

 

[blackburn49]

We are all fortunate that there is so much of this sawmill which has survived. Nice shots.

and you're modelling all of this, right?

 

[tmejia]

Great pictures Dwight.

See you in Phoenix./DesktopModules/NTForums/themes/mls/emoticons/w00t.gif

Tommy
Rio Gracie

 

[Dwight Ennis]

must be well isolated on private property.
Bingo!! &nbsp &nbsp When I do model this, it'll be in On30. I don't even have room for a small layout, let alone a huge 1:20.3 sawmill.

 

[SteveC]

Dwight

Sorry guy but I just couldn't make much of the pictures, maybe it's just my old system. Anyway I copied them down and tweaked them a bit till I could see what you were talking about. Hope this is of help.

Redundant images removed, causes added download time with no added benefit.

 

[Dwight Ennis]

I donno Steve. They look fine on my laptop at home and on my laptop at work. Others have also looked at them. To me, yours look way overexposed.

Anyone else have trouble seeing them?

 

[Curmudgeon]

The second set is visible.
First batch way too dark to discern anything usable.

 

[Semper Vaporo]

Some were a little dark, but mostly those of the interior of the building, as one would expect. In lightening them some ".jpg compression artifacts" crept in making some of them a little "mottled" which ruined some of the detail.

But by lightening them, some details, although visible in the originals, were enhanced and made more noticable. If I go back to the originals I can see those details, but they were not "brought to the eye" like the lightened ones did.

I find that my laptop's back-light will, for some reason I cannot figure out, revert to the "dim" (or power saving) mode. I periodically have to repeatedly type the keysequence to brighten the light (I think there are 16 brightness levels), but later I find that it has gone down to a dimmer level, again.

Maybe SteveC's is a 'dimmer' system and your's is a naturally brigher one? There has always been, and will probably always be, vast differences in the color and brightness reproduction on computer (and TV) monitors.

 

[Curmudgeon]

Mine is a PC, not a laptop, and nothing changes.

 

[paintjockey]

Wow. Really great pictures. Thanks for sharing them.
My sawmill won't be that big, but it's good inspiration.
Terry

 

[Pete Thornton]

First batch way too dark to discern anything usable

Looked fine on my laptop - the second setwere way over-brightened for me.

Most computers have a 'dimmer' or brightness control - you can always turn it up!

 

[Semper Vaporo]

It's been a while since I played with a PC that uses a CRT type monitor... During the last few years at work I had a plasma display similar to a laptop.

But even the desktop plasma displays and the the big ol' CRT I used to have, had/have several knobs (or an on-screen menu with sliders) for adjusting the brightness, contrast and color, as well as the display card in the computer having control of the same things.

I used to spend a couple of hours (before a photo retouching session) re-adjusting the PC's display card to generate the correct colors on the monitor to match the color printer I was going to use, so when I retouched a photo and then printed it, the picture I was working with on the monitor produced the same photo on the printer. I always started by printing a known color card on the printer and then centering the controls on the monitor and then adjust the PC display card to get the screen to display the same colors as the color card as printed by the printer (often it took readjustments of the monitors controls, too).

The ambient lighting made a vast difference in the settings especially when my desk was moved to be near windows and then it depended on the time of day and what the weather was.

Monitors produce vastly different images when presented with the same display signal... go into any store that sells lots of TVs and look at the differences in them... even the same makes and models will be different!

So... when you see a photo from the web and you would expect it to be a bit brighter than what you are seeing, you might want to adjust "your" monitor's brightness and color levels. I am not saying the photo from the web might not be very dark (or of odd colors or poor contrast, etc.... often they are very bad) but there is a possiblilty that your display is what is dark or producing odd colors.

Just a side note here. My TV is pretty good, but I have noticed that often when I am watching some talk show or something where someone will comment on another person's clothing and say something, like: "My that is a pretty blue dress." I will have been thinking that it was a GREEN dress! I see blue skies and green grass on my TV, but with clothing the blue and green colors are almost invariably reversed... dunno why. When I first noticed it, I thought maybe the person was just being facetious, but it has happened too many times. I also remember a scene with a stop light and the "GO" signal was a lovely shade of "BLUE"!

 

[Dwight Ennis]

The guys doing astrophotography deal with these monitor issues all the time. Some even buy special "calibration" hardware/software combos so they know what they see on their machine is what's supposed to be seen. Don't think I'll be buying that equipment anytime soon. hehehe

So long as everyone can see one version or t'other, that's the important thing.&nbsp &nbsp Thanks Steve.

 

[Dwight Ennis]

At the bottom of the road is the Green Shed, also part of the new mill built in 1955
I goofed on this one. It can be seen above the mill in the '49 photo along with the conveyor leading to it from the mill proper.

 

[Semper Vaporo]

How "safe" did you feel (or were you) wandering around in the buildings? Especially in the upper levels? That one photo (27th I think) captioned above with: "Roof of the main mill sorting and cutoff area from the filer's room... "... that joist in the foreground looks to be broken to a spear shape on the left.

 

[SteveC]

Like I said, it's most likely my old system and monitor, the monitor is set to 32 bit true color at 1024 x 768, and yes I know how to use the brightness and contrast controls on the monitor , but that didn't change much at all. As to the quality of the image, I wasn't trying to win a photo contest just see what was there. /DesktopModules/NTForums/themes/mls/emoticons/hehe.gif

For example, the picture where the blade is laying on the floor, in the original picture regardless of setting I couldn't even see that there was anything there, same went for the picture of the bandsaw itself.

 

[Semper Vaporo]

I think I am more interested in what kind of animal that two legged creature is? Looks like dog's legs on some sort of bird.

 

[Joe McGarry]

Thanks for another inspiring picture tour. Really a good job Dwight .

Regards,
Joe McGarry