Day 5 - the last 20%

That's the theory isn't it?

I believe I heard someone say that the first 80% of a job takes 20% of the time the last 20% of the job takes 80% of the time.

Well I reckon I'm at that stage now. Pretty much all the "heavy lifting" is out of the way. There's one significant part that I won't tackle just yet and that is the procscenium arch or "picture frame" for the front of the layout. That's something to bear in mind should I ever wish to take the layout to a show.

So today it will be a bit here a bit there, adding some details to the layout. I'm weathering 8 axles of freight car wheels to put on there at the moment. I need a lot more of them very clearly. The scrap pile needs adding to. I'm sure I can find plenty to do.

A cautionary tale

Whew!

I've just spent the last 45 minutes or so broggling around with one of the points trying to get it to work.

I just thought I'd better give the track a test run after all that spraying of glue that I did yesterday associated with the ballasting and such like.

I gave the track a pretty serious rubbing down with a track cleaner and hooked up the wires. It worked perfectly except for when the first turnout was set for the straight road. Now this was a puzzlement. Everything worked perfectly before I started spraying and I covered all the pertinent part of the turnouts to protect them from overspray.

Not being electrically minded, anytime something like this happens I get pretty fed up because I know that it will take me an age to sort it out.

Surely enough it did. It took me quite some time to find out that some glue and spray paint had caked up the pivot point between the straight switch rail and stock rail (or is that closure rail). Anyway once I'd found that and cleared everything out it ran perfectly again. Things are back on track excuse the pun. I think I should work on the backscene now.

Day 2 the story so far

Right then, after a quick jaunt down to Hobbytown in Brooklyn Park I returned armed with supplies to hopefully see me though to the end of the project.

The first job was to complete my ground covering. Before heading down to the hobby shop I added a little more spackle as described in the previous post so as the layout looked like this. Like there had been a snowfall. It's at this stage of a layouts construction that I always consider recreating a snow scene. But my previous efforts have met with failure so luckily that idea quickly passes.

Upon my return the spackle had pretty much dried so I set to and gave a covering of earth undercoat to kill the white of the spackle. I think that after just one coat of Earth colour it starts to feel like a layout. So I left that to dry and did some more work on the structure.

Oh boy this is going to be a long job. I went to the hobby shop with the intent of getting some corrugated embossed evergreen styrene sheet. But they were out.But they did have something called "Metal Roofing" It's a sheet of styrene with precision milled grooves in it where you place strips of .25mm x 1mm styrene strip to represent the distinctive profile of the roof. I see this style all over so I thought to myself.

"Why not. All you have to do is place the strip into the groove and a dab or two of liquid poly will hold it in place."

That is pretty much it. But there is a technique to doing that and it took quite a while to find the speediest easiest way to do that. lets just say the first section of roofing took longer to do than the next two sections...

So that I could take a photograph for progress purposes I gave the shell of the lean to a coating of grey, so it wouldn't bleach out in the picture.
There you go that's progress for today so far. Not as earth shattering as yesterday. But the building starts to look like a building. Hopefully tomorrow it will get completed and I'll get the ballasting done as well.

A word about spackle

I've mentioned my use of spackle as a ground covering and said that I've always used it right from my earliest layouts. But I don't think I've ever said how I use it.

I use a lightweight spackle. (For the Brits reading this It's kind of like polyfilla except pre-mixed.) I spread it out onto my ground surface much as I would when I'm icing our Christmas cake. It doesn't really matter how roughly you do it. Because lets face it unless your modelling a cricket wicket or something else thats dead flat you can have tiny little bumps and undulations in there. That perhaps later you can fill with puddles of water.

So there you are you have a baseboard that looks like a rough iced Christmas cake. Then you leave it for a while for the spackle to start setting. Mine is a quick setting spackle. So I've just about got time to write this post. Then I go and smooth it out by tapping down on it with my finger... back in a minute then

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Right that's that done.

You have to wait for the spackle to start to set because otherwise it sticks to your finger and when even the tiniest bit sticks to your finger then it will pull more off the baseboard. Which is not what we're trying to do here. We're trying to smooth out what we have already done. Just tapping a small area down with your finger is really quite effective.

As I've been burying a couple of sidings in the spackle I've been taking great care to clean the rails off and running a wagon along the sidings to make sure everything still runs perfectly. Which it still seems to do.

Next task I think is a trip down to the hobby shop and get some more materials to clad the wall with. That will take a couple of hours. Plenty of time for the spackle to dry and then on my return I can paint it.

Stumps on day 1

Right then. Pretty much the end of the first official day on the project and here is where it stands. As you know the track was down by lunchtime and working. The track and sleepers were sprayed with track colours to weather the plastic looking sleepers. After that I set out to block out the main structure to see how it would fit.

It looks OK but until I get some more detail on the structure it will be difficult to tell how it will sit in the scene. Don't forget that there will be a big pile of scrap in front of some of it obstructing your view of it.

Next task is to put down the spackle for the ground cover to bury the trackwork. That will be tomorrows task along with more work on the building...

Lunch on Day One

Make it sound like a cricket commentary doesn't it?

So my trip to Menards was uneventful the cork tile was in stock and I got a few other bits and bobs too.

Lightweight spackle for my ground cover. The trackwork will be pretty much buried and lightweight spackle is my favourite material for the job. It dries white and takes the colour from the woodland scenics earth undercoat very well.

I also needed some woodworking glue and you can never have enough Stanley knife blades and with a pack of 100 on sale for $5 that was too good an offer to miss out on.

With that it was off home and get on with it.

A couple of hours later and it's lunchtime. The cork is down, the track is laid and a locomotive has run to check the electrics. I even installed the Kadee under the track uncoupler and it works perfectly much to my joy.

So this afternoon I'll spray the track with some dark earth to kill the plastic look of the sleepers. That's a trick I picked up from Lou Sassi's book "A realistic HO Scale layout for beginners" published by Kalmbach. A book I bought several years ago and still refer to to this day.

I'll probably even start on the one low relief building on the layout too.

...and now the batsmen emerge from the pavilion ready to start the afternoons play...

Day 1 part 1

6:30 am. I was thinking that as I'm on holiday from work I'd get a bit more of a lie in than this. But I suppose once your body is used to getting up at 5am during the week then it takes a lot to get out of that.

So what is the plan today?

The first thing is to get down to Menards and get some 1/4" cork tiles to lay the track on to. It has to be 1/4" because I've got one of those huge Kadee #308 under the track uncouplers that I'm going to use on the front siding and they're about 1/4" thick.

So by the end of the day the minimum I want to see done is track down and working with the uncouplers sited. Anything on top of that is a bonus.