O gauge scenery made from household accesiories... How do you do it?

[Anonymous]

Please help me . I want to make some O gauge scenery but don't have any thing. Please help me.[?]

[daan]

Simply; use you imagination and try.. An empty can (from food or paint or something else) can be put upside down, solder a wire as a fence on top of it, paint it grey and glue a small ladder to the side, you have an industrial oil or gaz tank. (clean it before using!![:D]
With simple electricity wire you can make, with some patience, a tree. Use cardboard and wood (ice-sticks) to buid houses, a shoebox will provide a locomotive shed with some paint and sandpaper (as a roof)..
The hard clear plastic boxes where nails are in when you buy them(or old cd cases); ideal windows!
You can even use the sludge from coffee after it's being dried as soil on your layout.
Pictures on boxes of food can be cut out and placed on your layout as billboards,
Electronic parts from an old radio can be cut out and be used (after painting) as small add on details for undersides of cars (brakepressure containers) or as oil drums on a factory plant. Paint two small blocks of wood grey, drill a few small holes in it, and put in small resistors painted dark red (a row on each side) You have a miniature transformer to put near a power plant.
Use simple toy-cars instead of the scale models. Etc.. Your emagination is the only boundary in this one..

[cnw1995]

Daan is right, you can use anything - gather a collection of whatever you can find around your house and see what you can do with it - almost anything can become 'freight' to carry in gondolas or boxcars or on platforms: burnt out Christmas light fuses, old watch batteries or medicine bottles. An asthma inhaler makes great industrial air vents or an a/c.; olor sandpaper with a green crayon for a patch of new grass; use the packing 'grass' that comes in some boxes for hedges and bushes. Popsicle sticks or coffee stirrers can be almost anything - with some white glue: fencing, a bridge, even a building. Sticks from the yard can be trees. Do not be afraid to experiment. Share what you have done here.

[Anonymous]

I made a paper mache and a wallpaper glue tunnel through a mountian.


( what could i put on the mountian?)


( People Skiing? LOL) [:D]

[daan]

Hi snell50, that's a good start. Did you build it on a chickenwire frame?? You could make trees to go up the mountain, a small house (h0 scale, it will look as if it's far away) or a castle. (that's what europeans do, specially in germany, if you have a mountain, put a castle on top of it.. so I don't know if it's prototypicall for your mountain..)
You could make a cablecar or a skilift..
The best thing you can do is look on the internet and find pictures of mountains.
If you choose colorpictures, you'll see the right colours, the way rocks look (rocks can be made with styrofoam and plaster) and how a mountain looks with or without trees.
If you make rocks, break the styrofoam and glue with woodglue (the white stuff) the parts with the broken edges outwards. Then use plaster to make the surface smooth and less bubbly. The breaksurface will make a nice random rockformation, specially if you glue the plates into an angle. In real life the rocks breaklines are allways in an angle, representing the rockplate pushed over another one, forming the mountain.
If you make an angle in your plates glued together, you copy that from reality and you don't have to match the brakelines of the different plates to eachother.
Paint it with the whash wethod, using a light grey groundtone and a sponge with very thinned black paint to make shadows and cracks more visible. Then use a photo of a real rockformation to finish with some other colors (oker, brown, burned sienna etc)
If it's dry and solid, use some grass on the edges, make bushes, etc.
It's not that difficult, but by trying the student becomes master..