I try to make an excuse to go by the train store once a week. Today, I was celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Day. Dr. King was an amazing man and a leader of epic proportions. He is also a great Atlantan so today...we celebrate!
I bought a pack of Micro Engineering Code 55 Nickel Silver Rail - Weathered. For the Sippin' Swamp diorama I need VERY petite rail like the prototype. I keep a supply of all sizes of this rail and use it often. The $43.20 price tag is not for the faint of heart, as it's $1.30 per 3 foot section, but the quality can't be beat.
Funny, but when I went in the Hobby Shoppe here in Salt Lake, Randy acted like he had just ordered it for me. I asked for code 55 and he literally handed it to me like he had been holding it all day just waiting for me to come in. Strange. Guess he is psychic!
The Hebard Cypress Company laid 200 miles of track in the 500,000 square acre Okefenokee Swamp. Since only a small fraction of the swamp is island, the majority of it was laid on pilings in the swamp.
Tonight's guest photographer is Taylor Perry, my daughter, who is five and a half and better at it than I am. Go figure!
Here is the Hebard Number Two Spot locomotive on just such pilings. They were driven as much as 40 feet into the muck at the bottom with a crosstie to hold them together. This is what we are building.
So the construction goes like this. We'll need a two pilings per crosstie. The tie is spiked on top without any kind of flashing for the top of the piling. Yes, I'm going to lay rail on that!!! By hand!
I'll be using 3/8" hardwood dowel stock. These I keep in the wood box, so I grabbed a couple.
Using my handy Harbor Freight Mini Chop Saw, I'll cut the pilings to a prototypical four feet above the water and half a foot in the water for a 4.5 foot piling. I've enlisted the help of an aluminum stop block to keep the cuts the same length.
First, we'll distress the wood using an old Atlas track saw that I keep for just such work.
Photo by Taylor Perry
Using my leg as a rest for the dowel I drag the saw blade down the dowel to ruff it up a bit.
Photo by Taylor Perry
You want to vary the grazing a bit as if you make it perfect the wood (in photos) will look like it has stripes. That is why I use this 20 year old blade as it has teeth missing. Be sure to go all the way to the end with each stroke as you rotate the dowel.
Photo by Taylor Perry
I take my time with each cut to get it as precise as I can get it. I've used this saw a lot and really should upgrade to something more substantial, but it does the work.
Photo by Taylor Perry
I cut 100 pilings, as I use them quite frequently.
Taylor was kind enough to actually count how many I needed, which was only 64 considering that there is dry land on both ends. Should have counted before I started!
Now we need to stain the wood. We'll stain both the pilings and a double hand full of crossties. I use S scale crossties from Mount Albert. For staining you'll need black leather dye, isopropyl alcohol, tweezers, gloves, syringe (not pictured), paper towels and a small dish. I use a glass ashtray as it is very heavy and doesn't tip over.
We'll need to mix the stain solution.
Since there is only a small amount to be stained, we'll use this small ashtray (finally a GOOD use for one) and fill it half full of alcohol.
Taking the syringe we take 5 cc's of black dye.
Photo by Taylor Perry
You must be careful not to knock over the dye bottle as it ruins EVERYTHING it touches. I cover the area in paper and have ample paper towels and a trash can on hand. Gloves are another mandatory unless you want to explain to your coworkers tomorrow that you play with trains.
Photo by Taylor Perry
Using the large tweezers I grab 1/3 of the pilings and put them in the dark solution. Ok, this is TOO DARK. I used to much! No matter. The next batch we'll thin out and make later. What I usually do is go from light to dark stain in three stages. That way the pilings and crossties all look different.
Photo by Taylor Perry
I take the wood and stir it around and then take them out and lay them on a paper towel to dry.
Photo by Taylor Perry
Next we dump in some crossties in the same dark stain and swirl them around for about a minute or two. The longer they stay, the darker they get.
Photo by Taylor Perry
Each stage of the process takes time, but you don't want to get sloppy because you'll dye your workspace and yourself black.
Photo by Taylor Perry
I thinned out the stain by removing half of the liquid in the ashtray and replacing it with clear alcohol. The stain, as you can see in the photo, is much lighter.
Photo by Taylor Perry
Um, Taylor...shoot a little more to the right, please.
Photo by Taylor Perry
The third batch of stain I removed even more of the stain and replaced with clear alcohol. This would give me the lightest color.
Photo by Taylor Perry
The crossties are lighter but still very weathered. As they dry the blackness becomes a more blue color.
Photo by Taylor Perry
Here is a pile of pilings. As they dry they will lighten up. They also will be different colors from the ties as they are hardwood materials and the crossties are sugar pine and much more apt to take the stain.
Photo by Taylor Perry
Once they dry, I'll take all the pilings and pile them into one pile. Then I'll mix them up so that there is a good assortment.
Here we have a bin with pilings and a bin with crossties. I've put a raw tie and piling in either of the bins to show the color change.
Using Glad Zipper Snack Bags (about a 1/2 quart bag) I'll clearly label it for what is inside. This is CRITICAL to scratchbuilding as it prevents you from having to re-cut wood later.
There! Two bags of parts.
Oops! Still not quite dry. I'll open the bags and leave them for 24 hours or more to thoroughly dry out.
After clear coating, we're ready to put on a base coat of black. This will give us a starting point for the swamp water later.
The shiny surface will keep anything from penetrating the wood, mainly glue and paint. But we want to give the swamp water a black starter coating for its mirror finish. Other modelers keep using muddy looking water but any swamp I have seen the water is clear and tea colored up close and mirror black at a distance. Again, START WITH THE PROTOTYPE.
Hey, let's use that new can of Testor's Flat Black! We'll go out to the garage to paint this.
There! Didn't take too long, but it does dry slow. I painted the edges, too, but not the bottom.
Next we need to decide where the track is going to go. Really, we need to decide where the pilings are going to go. Using a piece of Micro Engineering On30 track, I flexed it again to the pattern that we drew earlier.
We will use a can of Floquil Roof Brown (just because it was handy) and the track will become a stencil for the pilings.
I put down newsprint and marked the edges of the track with the stencil. Then I put the wood base on the stencil and realigned the track on top of it. Using a light touch I spray painted the track, leaving a stencil marking of it to use for the alignment of the pilings.
I've been on the road for about 5 days. Yeah, I don't post the blog every day. In fact, I usually don't post until the weekend, and the post come out daily the following week. Often I'm doing it all on Sunday evening. When I'm traveling I love to go to hobby shops in the evening when I can. Chicago is FULL of them so I go to the ones I'm close to.
There is a very old hobby shop on the Midway side of Chicago that I like to visit. Its owners are old and grumpy and you are usually treated like a potential thief until you buy something, but they have old stuff that is out of production and I love to find things. Now, if they would only let me behind the counter. Today I found a Bowser loco cradle. Just what I wanted!
This one is large and very soft. It holds an HO loco quite snug. I just thought...why aren't these things available in other scales? I love the extra area up top to sit tools. I had one of these many years ago, but it dry rotted from sitting under my hot lights for so long. It was $15 which is a LOT for a small hunk of foam, but I'll get 10 years of use out of it.
When compared to the Peco one that I bought about a month ago, there is no comparison. It is FAR better quality.
For $6.25 I bought a used copy of Colorado Railroad Structures Volume II by Klaas Gunnink. It just so happens that I'm thinking about building an HOn3 D&RG water tower to go in my office with my models and this has the perfect plan. It is all plans, in fact. It was ok for $6.25, but I would not have paid full price for it.
And now for the I AM STUPID category. Yes, I am an impulse buyer. I've admired the Utah Railway locos in my new home town and this Rail Power Products #410 UR Shell was irresistible. I got 10% off the $45 price tag, but should have gotten a lot more. Normally I'm a good negotiator but it was late and I saw it after I'd already bought some stuff. Not sure how it wound up in this Chicago store, but it had to go home with me.
This old store has TONS of parts, so I always buy up some for the parts drawers. Today I harvested a bunch of Tichy nuts, bolts, washer castings and some doors that looked like they belong on something I need to build. I like having all the different castings so that I know which ones to order for bigger projects. Tichy was smart to cast them in brown! Hello, Grandt Line????
At my local hobby shop, M.R.S. Hobbies in Sandy, Utah I bought Testor's Flat Black and Dull Coat, along with some thin ACC adhesive. Testor's Dull Coat is about one of the best products that I've used and I swear by it. I'm continuing to replace many of the paints and chemicals that I lost in the move.
The Bull Chute diorama has had several days to dry. I made a mess of the weeds (modeling in a hurry NEVER works) so I did a little repair work before I got started.
Using a pair of fine tipped tweezers I removed strands of long weeds that I had glued on. One of the big problems I've had is getting the weeds to stand up straight. If you have ideas, I'm all ears. Probably I'm cutting them too long. After I weed-eated the diorama, I got out the Tacky Glue and tried again. The thicker glue and shorter weeds made it look better, but I'm still not happy with the results.
Using Woodland Scenics Clump Foliage Dark Green I glued some shrubs to the areas where the grass and ground didn't stick. My whole philosophy of modeling can be summed up like this:
"It's not the modeler's skill at building that makes him good, but his ability to cover up mistakes."
- Scott Perry
Next I'll add some light green ground foam and some twigs found in the yard. The track, like the Bull Chute, is abandoned so I put some green on the track as well. After that I dusted the area with fine green grass to help blend the scenic elements.
We'll set the diorama aside to dry for 6 hours. The thick glue will need that. After waiting I did one last touch up of anything that didn't stick when I turned the whole diorama upside down. Looking good. More dry time.
Here the glue is still drying, but it is looking good. In reality the chute would need more weathering, but since I want it clearly visible for the class, I left it alone.
Just another shot.
Here is our finished project.
And another shot. This is fun! Soon I'll finish the clinic slide show and post it here for you to use at your NMRA Division meeting! Hands on clinics are the best way to learn!
