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.

Finishing the wooden fence

I finished the wooden fence during the weekend.

A longer fence

I have built a longer fence, and put it down more permanently on the layout. This time I also made an attempt to at making nails. I tested various ways of doing this but ended up simply making a mark with a pencil. Here are some pictures.

The grass, which I though would be suitable for O, looks to thick I think.

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.

All rail done

Finally I have managed to get all rail painted and weathered. Some new pics.

With that all done I hope to get started on some scenicking, or car or engine detailing...

Stone wall, part 3

The stone wall I showed in the previous post have stones that looks merely stacked on top of each other. Although that can certainly be the case in the real world, at least in older times, I wanted to try a wall with mortar between the stones.

So I sat ought to do a short test section in the same way as before, but now with spackling compound between the stones. I went about more or less as you would apply mortar between real stones.

Once the compound had dried I proceeded as with the previous wall with an India Ink wash, some additional colouring and last some moss. Here is the finished wall.

And for comparison, alongside the one without mortar.

The second one is OK as well. It's just different. But I think I like the first one better. But of course, it all depends on what kind of wall you want to replicate and what fits the rest of the scenery.

Stone wall, part 2

I finished my stone wall test today.

I first gave it a somewhat uneven India Ink wash, followed by some dry brushing - gray, concrete and brown colors. After this I sprayed the wall with Testors Dullcote.

I wanted part of the wall to be overgrown with moss. For moss I used Woodland Scenics T49 Blended Turf - Green Blend. I applied white glue with a small brush where I wanted the moss, and then sprinkled on the turf. I then immediately shook and blew the excess turf away.

I'm really happy with the result.