A Step Forward With Ballast, A Step Back With Trees

 Stepping Backward With Trees

I have started teaching myself to make bottle brush trees. The technique should allow me to make classic confier firs like the Douglas Fir. Unfortately what I ended up with was something that looked like a stick used to sample pond algae.

The tecnhique is strait out of Joe Fugate's scenery dvds. You can get a copy of the chapter I used for this for a couple of bucks as a download.

The technique involves using wire, straw, and sisal to make the body of the tree. I cut 2" (I think..) long pieces of straw from the broom weeding out the big ones to make a N scale sized tree. These were stuck onto a 4" long piece of tape. A second piece of tape was laid on top trapping the straw.

The tape was fit between a wire bent like a hairpin. One end of this is clamped. The other end is chucked in a drill. The drill twists it all up into a bottle brush shape which is then trimmed into a conifer. I should have gotten a picture of the tree as I built it.. now there's an idea! I finish this stage off by spraying with grey primer.

I cut some sisal twine into billions of premium 1/4" sisalettes. This was a nice task to do on the couch (in a tray..) while me and the wife watched, appropriately enough, Chopped. I now have a quart jug of premium 1/4" deluxe sisalettes. The tree is sprayed with hair spray and coated in the sisalettes to give the tree body. I hit this with brown paint.

This seems to be the point where my technique and Joe's video part company. The sisal is not clinging in a believable and full fashion. Maybe my pieces are too small? Maybe the distance between branches is too great? I need to watch the video again and take another try at it.

The next step is to coat the tree with ground foam. If the tree looks like a mishapen cotton candy then all the foam in the world won't help. Believe it or not, the tree shown here really did start as a cone..

 Stepping Forward with Ballast

My ballasting has improved quite a lot and is providing me with much more statisfaction. There is still quite a lot of work to be done and improvement to be made, but I seem to be headed on the right track. The improvement is due to both changes in materials and changes in methodology.

Changes

I purchased three containers of ballast material at the Scenic Express booth at the National Train Show. I got light gray limestone, dark gray limestone, and fine light cinders. This material is the real McCoy.. real limestone and cinder. It spreads well, holds its shape, and looks great. I can't say enough about how superior a product this is compared to the Woodland Scenics ballast I used before. The finer limestone material is in their print catalog but not online.

I made a few changes to the ballasting method. I used a pinched plastic cup to pour ballast rather then a spoon and I used a foam brush trimmed to the inside width of the track to spread the ballast on the inside. The material of the foam brush seemed to spread the ballast without sending it flying or digging it up where it was already flush. Some of this was the heavier material I was using. I shaped the shoulders using a plastic clay tool. There is one in particular I have that looks like a medieval pole arm that is especially good.

I spread the middle first. After that dried, I spread glue down on the shoulders and scenery edge and laid on the cinder material. I vacuumed up the excess. This made the cinder covered right of way appropriate for the transition era I am modeling in this case. My next layout will be 70s so I won't always have a cinder base. After that I came in with the light or dark ballast.

Some New (to me) Ideas

There were two especially key things that I have not read before:

- After getting the ballast mostly shaped I came in with a shop vac using the fine nozzle. I held it some inches away. This "pulled" the loose ballast from the edges and made a nice sharp ballast line on the dry cinders. The best part is it made the ballast fall down the edges making a very nice shoulder. My pole arm tool tended to leave a little bit extra on the shoulder that was perfect for this method. It didn't work in cases where I can't hold the nozzle far enough away, but where I could it was very effective. Unfortunately I really got this technique perfected on the FAR side of the light ballast in the image so you can't really see it at its best.

- I was using a alcohol as a wetting agent followed by a 50/50 mix of dilute white glue and water. I had used 3:1 water/glue but it wasn't holding. In the image above, the right half of the dark ballast is done this way. You can see that its a bit rough. Some of that is from so much wetting and pooling, Some is from crumbling when I rubbed it with my fingers. As an experiment I mixed detergent with 3:1 water and white glue. This worked great! It let me dribble liquid in only one pass creating less disturbance. It soaked in quickly and effectively. It glued hard and dry much more quickly. I was very pleased. I am wondering if the alcohol was interfering with the white glue? Maybe I used too much. Regardless, I am quite happy with my current technique. It requires less time, less glue, and produces better effect.

Painting

This time I went the extra step to do some painting on the rail and ties. I used Floquil enamel weathering pens on the track. The ties were hit with railroad tie brown. Later I will go in and vary the color with some grimy black and a lighter brown in some places. The rail in the bottom track was done using rail brown. The top track was done using rust. I then hit the ballast of the top track dry brushing a polly-scale rust wash. I was very pleased with the result. I think the top track really captures a modern track look. In this case its the back of my oval. Its going to be an unused spur. I didn't weather it with oil in the middle.. I will instead be using ground foam and flock to make it look over-grown.

Choosing a Color

Color slides from the 50s of B&M lines show them pretty universally dark. Presumably from ash and cinders from steam traffic. The glue darkened the dark limestone more then I would want. I will try to make a blend but I think it will look more speckled then medium gray. I know traditionally light color was mainline.. but the color pics I saw tended to show either fresh ballast, or dark ballast.. mainline or not. I am undecided at this point if I want to continue my mainline with the darker ballast. It seems off but I don't know how much of that is my diesel era sense of color.

Anyway.. thats what I have for now. I have some friends from my N scale group coming over in a few weeks.. so I will be doing my best to get the bridge finished and installed so I can run trains and get my basement picked up. My first open house! It should be fun. I will be getting some help with some tasks I need to bring my basement to a higher finish too. We can't afford a true finished basement but I can make it more comfortable.

Regards,

Chris