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I was asked how I dusted everything:
Much of the work going on now is the same as in previous posts, just in a new area - building the lattice support structure from cardboard, covering that with plaster gauze, casting rocks and placing them, filling the gaps with more plaster, then laying down a plaster terrain base in the flatter areas. Here is a shot showing both the lattice work and the gauze. You can see the track and the non-removable structures - the turntable and engine house - are masked off. Drips happen.
A little more detail about placing the "jigsaw puzzle" of rock castings - working with plaster products is a race against the clock, as once it is mixed with water, it begins to cure and become unusable. I take the time to dry fit the rock castings over the gauze base, marking their placement and orientation. Then I can mix up a batch of plaster to back-butter the castings and stick them into place pretty quickly. You may notice the numbers on the gauze base are upside-down - that's because I'm working from the outside, on a stepstool. They look right-side up from there!
The plaster I use for making the cast rocks is Hydrocal - it starts out very thin, picks up all the detail from the molds, and cures very hard and brittle. With all the these in place, I come back and fill the gaps with a different plaster product, Sculptamold. This is actually a mixture of plaster and a finely-ground fibrous material like cellulose. Dry in
the bag, it has a texture kind of like powdery cotton balls. This product cures just a bit slower, and I can further slow that down by adding just a little baking powder to the mix.
This allows more working time.
A disadvantage to the slower curing time is that as it cures, it can bubble and "burp", and cause small holes to appear overnight. I look at the area from all angles, and mark the holes with pieces of tape. That's because once I mix up a new batch to cover these holes, they can be hard to find from my vantage point on the stepstool. I work more
Sculptamold into the holes, then hit them with a hair dryer to speed up the cure a bit - this usually keeps it from burping again. But after a day or two, it's not unusual to find just a few more holes that need refilling.
Once the more vertical and rocky surfaces are done, I use Sculptamold again to cover all of the remaining terrain base, whether it be plywood, cork sheet, or cardboard (there is still some to do around the depot). Here are a couple of shots of the area to this point. You can see masking where the depot platform has been installed around where that structure will go, and also wooden "foundation" outlines where other structures will go. Also the rock walls near the hairpin turn in the road, and the capstones for those walls, which were hand-carved from pink insulation foam. Both the walls and the capstones will be painted with the same reddish color of the mountains.
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I need to let all of this cure for a good 2 weeks before sanding the roadways to better define them, and adding color, otherwise the plaster products just suck up all the color, and they look too pale. In the meantime, I'll be working to build more structures on the bench.
