No.31 Platform Update
The gales and hailstones continue so luckily no gardening. There has been plenty of time to progress the platform paving.
My previous layouts were made from chipboard and I used the
off cuts to form the platform bases which were then surfaced with 3mm plywood.
This time I chose to use 5mm balsa wood for the surfacing. This gives me a top of rail to platform surface height of 12mm for my code 100 Peco Streamline track. The balsa surface is held in place with counter sunk steel pins, whilst the platform sides are covered with brick or stone paper.
Life is very short and I do not have time to emulate this
level of modelling. However I have
proposed to make a start. Having
identified some suitable sizes of paving (in a previous entry on this Blog) I
decided to mark out some trial ‘panels’.
The balsa surface was first scribed using a sharp and
relatively hard pencil. The surface was
then given a coat of household emulsion paint (Magnolia). This is water based and has a tendancy to
swell out any imperfections in the surface.
In order to remove the wood grain effect the whole of the platform top
was then rubbed over with fine sand paper.
The scribed lines were cleaned back out using a pencil. Finally where the pencil lines were obviously
cutting across the grain of the balsa wood I lightly scored the lines with a
very sharp knife.
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