10-27-21

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I've had curtains made to cover the access openings in the fascia. They have steel dowels sewn in, which attach and detach easily from magnets glued inside the board.

On to the last area to be completed. As always, I built up some structures just enough to test their fit as I plan out their placement and that of the main road thru town. You can see below that they need a bit more room in the back, against the hill coming down from the depot. Here's Dave sawing away at the rocks and plaster cloth - note safety shoes are not required.

Nearest the front edge will be a creek, with a road crossing it. This will be a deep pour of resin - about 1-1/4". This stuff will find any little pinhole to leak out while it's curing, which takes a few days, so it's necessary to build a sealed "tub". Here's an early shot, followed by the completed, sealed (with silicone caulk) tub, with the front fascia completing the seal - almost. The resin "water" in the creek will be exposed at the fascia at the 2 dips you see. These will be covered with temporary dams, which will be removed after the resin cures, to expose a "live edge" of water. I've seen this done on dining and gaming tables, but not on a model railroad (although I'm sure someone has done it before, I just can't find one).

Once the tub is done and (hopefully) water-tight, the terrain is built up along the banks and into the creek bed the same way all the other terrain is done. The newly-finished bridge along the road is still removable at this point, and the main control panel just unplugs and lifts out. The piece of clear plastic near the middle of the creek bed will become a waterfall.

Having never done a deep-pour like this, I built a couple of testbeds. In the shot below, the pour on the left was the first attempt, with the second on the right. I'm learning a lot as I go - notice the milky white color at the bottom, especially on the right - this was caused either by the plaster base not being fully cured, or the room humidity being too high, or possibly from using acrylic paint, rather than a resin dye, to tint the resin. And the face of the test on the right, after removing the temporary dam, is a lot better than the first - I tried 2 different methods for this. And the color, I think, needs to be a bit more blue, and just a little more murky. I'll play with creating the waterfall in the bed on the right.

If you look closely at the pour on the left, you will see there is a half-submerged rabbit near the back wall! I didn't have my 3D-printed ducks yet, but I have some extra rabbits. I want to try to have some ducks bobbing into the water with their butts up, as ducks do. It's a matter of inserting the animal at just the right time during the resin cure. The "rabbit test" was exactly at 24 hours after the pour - he didn't sink, but he did tip over ever so slowly. So I'll need to sacrifice another rabbit in my next test.

I'll address all of these issues on the next test pour, which will go in the testbed shown below. I used a laser level to project the waterline to help me place shrubs and stuff, and I'm doing the scenery in this testbed a little more like the real thing will be.