A bit thin on blog entries at the moment. Not because things are not busy for me but more that not a lot of the business has included model making. There are times like that and I am lucky this year so far in that I have spent more time on model making in the first four months of the year than probably in the previous four years!
At the moment there is a large project of redoing the garden. I am not a highly skilled creative gardener and my results are more likely to feature in a guide on how not to do your garden rather than be showcased at the Chelsea Flower Show. However I enjoy it and that is what that matters and hence the Project of Joy! At the moment work is centered around some hard landscaping and laying paving blocks is taking much time up. I do find this sort of thing very therapeutic. There is something about bringing mortar and blocks together that fascinates me! I can understand why Winston Churchill enjoyed brick laying as a hobby and there is a lot of information about this aspect of his life here.. My work is probably a shadow of his but progress is being made. As an aside getting materials, especially cement is proving a problem. I am told that there was a fire at a large cement works which has caused major issues. I had to travel 60 plus miles to actually get a couple of bags!
Moving onto the Project Of Woe or as I will call it the POW, this is a tale that typifies my modelling! Back in 2016 I bought a Bachmann Baldwin in 009 gauge in War Department grey as used in World War 1. Great model so a couple of wagons to match were bought.
Then the idea that being the time of the Centenary of WW1 it would be good to build a small layout with a WW1 theme. By about August 2018 I finally got round to starting the layout! No worries - a couple of months will see it done! Wind on to the present and there is the start of the layout and a series of problems that have dogged its progress.
First off I decided to build the baseboard out of foam board. Several sheets of foam board from The Range and a hot glue gun built a reasonable baseboard and WOW was it light in weight! Great! I started to lay the track and out came my stock of second hand 009 gauge points bought probably 20 years ago. Not sure if they were Peco or not but after a short while the sleeper bases just broke up. Having replaced them landscaping then commenced and with a coat of brown base paint the whole thing looked like this.
A nice simple layout with a passing loop and siding along with a slight hill to give some interest to the landscape. It was at this point that I suddenly became aware that foam board was not as stable as I thought and hot glue gun joints were not structurally very strong. What came about is that landscaping the top surface with plaster meant that as the plaster dried out and slightly shrunk it warped the baseboard - Oh Woe! I ended up with a banana shaped baseboard! I thought that I had a photo but can not find it. To cut a long story short two attempts with adding a wooden frame to which the base board was glued and bent back flat with some rather large G clamps were required to rectify the problem. Talking to someone who has success in using foam board baseboards has revealed that there are different qualities of foam board and you can get a much better and stronger joint between the foam board parts if you use the special cutter that gives a stepped joint. There are also a number of other tool s that are useful and some can be seen here
Having got a flat baseboard again some scenic work has been undertaken and in an earlier series of posts I dealt with the various Shelf Queens that I finished and they are for this layout. At present it all looks very stark and apologies for the picture quality but it was not the best light to take photos when I did these.
It is going to be some time before I get back to this project but there is a basis of an interesting layout there so hopefully it will become a Project of Joy one day. In the meantime I have to go back to my garden work and today is moving some large Yorke paving slabs - Oh Joy!!!!!!
