JV Kits

I've built two JV kits. A mine and a water tower. The box contains instructions and small bundles of wood. If you've never built a craftsman kit, these will be a challenge, but by no means impossible.

This is about the only picture I have of the water tower:

With this particular kit, it came with two round forms and again, bundles of lumber. The lumber is not pre-cut. These kit's are very much board-by-board construction.

AFAIK, these kits consist of a box of typically 100's of precut wood pieces that you must precisely glue together to build the structure. Nothing wrong with this type of kit  and you can get good results, but dexterity and skill is required to assemble properly.

I built the sawmill kit and I can assure you there are no precut pieces.  These are true craftsman kits where you have to make everything from a bundle of sticks.  Very enjoyable to build.  I recommend them to anyone who enjoys these types of kits.  A couple of photos hopefully show the detail parts included.  My diorama is a little dusty.  It's been under my bed for six months.

"A box of sticks"  I bought the Lucas Sawmill directly from the kitbuilder personally

in a convention, and then challenged him on the fact that no machinery was included.

He directed me to that outfit in W.Va. with the big buck kits for the interior.  I have

not built it, but instead tracked down a second interior for a sawmill kit I did build

(Keystone Danby), that did include an interior.  Note the one shown above has no interior machinery. With an interior in hand, I will build the JV one, probably with much kit bashing.  I HAVE built a building out of the parts in the JV Watson's Siding kit, which showed up really cheap on the net.  This is really a design it yourself, so I will probably build something else out of the parts.  I would say go find a Keystone kit.  My slightly kitbashed sawmill kit turned out great!  The Keystone kits show up from time

to time and I may have a second one around here.

Wow! I just paged back through the photos above, and the structure above has exactly

the same floor plan/approximate same size as the Keystone kit!  I will have to flip the

JV kit end for end....put the enclosed shop area somewhere else, etc.  There is a really

neat kit for a cone shaped sawdust burner out there to go with these.

Found a picture of my JV Models mine. This was the second wood kit I ever built. The first was the BTS shack kit also shown in the picture. A Bar Mills kit would probably have been a better kit to learn with before tackling the mine, but the mine turned out pretty well. It proves even a novice with very little skills can build one of these kits.

I find myself eyeballing the JV Models curved trestle for an end-of-layout curve (0-42 3-rail). Any builders or opinions? Thoughts appreciated. 

Thanks for all of the feedback and ideas. Valley Model Trains carries kits from many, many manufacturers. They have another sawmill kit made by KMP models. Have any of you ever worked with kits made by KMP?  Thanks, Paul

There was some publicity, an ad, in Narrow Gauge and Shortline Gazette, some time

ago about another sawmill kit...I remember little about it, so would like to see any

others out there pictured, except the large W. Va. one, in the unlikely event I build three tracks into the woods, instead of two.  Don't remember "KMP".