Boring ballasting so lets have some pontoon fun!

A trip to the recycling center saw the garden waste accumulated after several hard days of gardening activity (hope you read that bit Mrs. Woody) sent off on its journey to become compost for next year. However, no matter how careful I am the inside of the car always looks as though it is part of the recycling center after one of these trips so that needed hoovering out and then it seemed only right that if the inside was clean the outside should be so out came bucket and sponge. 

Feeling good about having a clean car I suddenly realised that it will mean only one, well actually two things. One is that it will get dirty again this weekend and the secondly Mrs. W will want the same cleaning treatment for her car! 

With those thoughts in my mind I did the only sensible thing and head off to my Man Cave where I pushed forward with a couple of things. Firstly a bit of ballasting on my 00 gauge Last Great Project layout.

Ballasting for me means doing shortish lengths at a time. To get a reasonable and realistic look to it does mean you have to spend time brushing and prodding the ballast into place and after 30 minutes or so of that I just get bored and can not face anymore!

So deciding I needed something a bit more light hearted I moved onto the Dragon Panzer Ferry kit and decided to have some fun with the pontoon part of the kit. Not much to it but some very big parts and some small parts all contained on two identical sprues.

Strangely, Mr Beecham had popped round earlier and to cut a long story short I gave him a bottle of Plastic Weld liquid glue from the WMD Stores so that he could get on with his model building until he gets to a model shop to replenish his own stocks. I have several bottles in stock and I suddenly realised I had not used any of this solvent for several years having moved onto Tamiya cement. The Tamiya product is a gentler solvent and if you over apply it to a joint you don't end up with melted moulded details. The Plastic Weld is a much more aggressive solvent which if you are using to join large, substantial parts is ideal as it really provides a strong joint and dries much more quickly then the Tamiya product. Looking at the parts for the pontoon it suddenly occured to me that Plastic Weld would be the best product to use and so another bottle came out of WMD Stores!

I glued the two parts of the hull to one of the side pieces and then the other side piece was added. 

The Plastic Weld did a great job but even its strength was not going to strengthen the rather weak joint between the two parts of the hull. So out came a scrap of plastic card and suitable pieces were cut out to add a strengthening part to both the hull and the deck..

Those joints should be fully hardened by tomorrow so hopefully the pontoon fun will continue although I suspect that there will be some boring ballasting too!