A wire fence

More fencing, this time a wire fence built from two sizes piano wire and some metal mesh. The first picture shows how I laid out the piano wire posts and top rails on a piece of wood, held in place with tape.

Next I soldered the posts and rails together. I also added a few brace posts.

After having cut a suitable piece of wire mesh, diagonally from a larger piece, I attached the mesh. That turned out to be easier said than done. The mesh was painstakingly "unruly" and had its own ideas on how to behave. And sitting tight was not one of them.

My initial idea was to glue (CA) the mesh to the supporting structure, but I gave that up and instead soldered it in place. The next two pictures show the fence after having been sprayed with a grey primer.

In the last picture the mesh shows traces of me wrestling with it. Those parts will hopefully be disguised by weeds and stuff. Some weathering and rusting is also to come.

A wooden fence

Today I built myself a short wooden fence. As with the stone walls I did a while back I'm testing methods. The intention being that there will be stretches of fences and walls along the track, towards the backdrop.

Since the boards making up an O scale fence are quite wide,and at the same time very thin, I found it hard to find any scale lumber that would do. If it was wide enough it was way to thick. What I eventually did was to get some 0.4 mm (1/64 in) plywood, which I would to cut into 4 mm (5/32 in) wide boards.

So let's start. Here is the plywood where I have cut off 40 mm bit, corresponding to the height of the fence, which would be about 2 scale meters (about 6 ft).

Next I used my NWSL Chopper to cut the plywood into individual boards. First I did not see that the Chopper's stop had a tendency to not stay put, making some of the boards too wide. Easily avoided once I had realized that this happened, but it made slowed down the whole process.

Also, the razor blade was a little to short, so the Chopper would no cut the complete length of the boards. But that was easily fixed with an X-Acto knife.

Once all the boards for my test fence had been cut, I soaked them in an India ink wash, along with the scale lumber I was to use for posts and supports. Here are the boards, once dry out of the wash.

I then laid out a simple jig, along with the horizontal support boards, and began gluing boards to the supports.

Soon they were all in place, along with two vertical posts.

When the glue had tried it was time to pose the fence on the layout.

Not that bad I think. And there are no more excuses for not building longer stretches of both fencing and stone walls.