My uncle, the owner of Grizzly Creek & Grumpy Flats Railroad, decided he needed a car to keep control of the weeds along his rails. He found an old Union Pacific flat car, an old scrap tank and told me to make him a "weed car". Horace, the black cat is even part of the crew.

Gary

I am about 7/8 finished with my rock carving of the first section. This has been a fantastic learning experience. And yes, I have redone most of my first attempts!. So what have I learned you may ask?

1. Pictures, pictures, pictures!!! Have lots of pictures of the kind of rocks you want to carve. Thank you Joe for that bit of advice. 

2. Facet surfaces. The gentleman on this forum who does a Civil War dated layout created a video on rock carving and when he talked about rock facet faces, a huge light bulb went off in my head.

I seem to be a little too dense to add photos to regular discussion forums. I wanted to share a couple of new photos on Driline WPF 1-13 thru 1-15 but can't figure it out. So here are a couple of new shots of my layout. By the way, comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Gary

After all of the cardboard, taping and paint, it is time to apply the thin coat of plaster. I estimated I had about 30 square feet of area to cover and was not looking forward to slowly applying the thin coat of plaster by hand. I decided to try using a wall texture spray gun. It worked great!

I applied three layers of my plaster mix allowing each layer to set up before adding the next layer. The plaster was still wet, but solid to the touch. 

Here are my pros and cons to the technique.

Cons:

I added paint to the masking tape and it took on a whole different feel. 

I am using many of the techniques Joe describes in his video building Tenmile Creek. I had never used masking tape to cover the frame work, but it works so well. 

With so much vertical walls to cover with plaster, I am going to try a different technique to applying the base plaster coat. I will let you know if it works.

I have been enjoying learning from everyone on this forum and now it is time to start building the Grizzley Creek & Grumpy Flats Railroad. The initial layout will be a shelf unit to experiment with different modeling techniques.