Making Trees
Howdy Folks. I've been reviewing quite a few model Railroading video's and info on building layout scenery and trees trying to get back up to date on things again. I see a lot of excellent info on the subjects from a lot of great people with lots of great ideas. one of my winter projects is to try and make trees for my layout. The only problem is that store bought trees for model railroads are not cheap and they only come with a few in a bag. This can get extremely expensive if you want to install a whole forest as well as placing lots of other trees in lots of other locations on your layout. Its getting to be Christmas time once again. So here is my question. Does anybody know if you can cut up an artificial Christmas tree and use its simulated pine needle limbs for miniature trees on a HO layout? A lot of them now-a-days sure look realistic. If you could, it would probably make loads of pine trees for a layout, and save a lot of tedious work. My family sure has several of them stored away in storage and my wife and daughter insists upon buying a new one every year. Anyway, thanks for any comeback on the subject.
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commercial pine tree kits....
I'm not sure which type you are looking to model, but I've had good experience with Jim's kits. They won't break the bank either... http://www.timberlinescenery.com/home.php
Good luck,
-bill
Realistic Conifers
Hello, I understand your plight to find affordable materials for making realistic HO scale conifer trees. I haven't seen the Xmas trees you speak of though that sounds interesting. If you want to make trees for background, the "bottle-brush" style is the easiest and fastest way to create lots of trees and gain "forest bulk". This type of tree might not have some of the detail you might want in trees that you feature up-front on your layout. Creating trees individually and carefully by hand is the only way I know of to make realistic looking forefront conifers, and yes, this can be a tedious job. I've attempted to reduce the number of steps required to do so in making these from scratch, and I try to keep costs down and offer items in bulk for larger projects. Although we don't have the bottle-brush type trees, we have kits for making small to large HO scale up-front conifers at www.coastmans.com. -Roger
Rogerdat
Christmas Garland
Howdy Prospector,
I use various size of cheap Christmas garland for the pine tree armatures. It comes in many sizes at the craft store.
Trim it to shape using tin snips, cover it with matte medium, dip it in grass(needles), shake off the excess and let it dry.
There are hundreds of these on my layout as the backround forest. I use Woodland scenics for the low volume, highly detailed foreground pine trees.
I also want to try using my static grass applicator on the wire armature of the garland to see if the grass will "stand up" and look more like pine needles.
FYI, because these have a metal "trunk", they can be straightened if you bend them while cleaning track, etc.
Happy Modeling, Bruce