Building with styrafoam

[Anonymous]

[:)] Starting to build sceanery for my new layout. I would like to get as much info on using styrafoam . Are there any sites that might show examples of what can be built. I hope you guys out can help me out. Felix

[overall]

The World's Greatest Hobby video with Micheal Gross shows an HO layout being built entirely with Styrofoam. I found it instructive for what we do too.

George

[FJ and G]

First, you affix your styrofoam to the tabletop or to other Styrofoam with liquid nails or tile adhesive





Then you sculpt the mountains with a drywall saw and sawzall, being sure to make a mess of the basement. Then slap on some brown latex paint and fling some dried clay from the backyard, along with small rocks and pebbles and affix with glue/water spray from spray bottle with a dash of soap to penetrate the clay (use clay, not dirt, as clay particles are scale size dirt and real dirt is too large grained and may contain critters).



Then you call out the track gang and lay some track





Then you run your trains



Then you eat a couple of Moon Pies



Then you go to sleep

[Anonymous]

I used stacked sheets of styrafoam for the larger "east side" mountain on my layout. I then used crumpled sheets of newspaper stacked and taped together for the "westside" mountain.
I found the styrafoam method to be very:
messy ( static cling reallly adds to the fun of the styrafoam shavings)
slow - even using a hot wire cutter was pretty slow.
more expensive - you can go through quite a few sheets for a large mountain and it requires a lot of cutting and fitting to get the basic shape done before carving begins.

Both methods provided the same level of final product.
Here's a link to some photos.
Mike
http://home.comcast.net/~graz6/wsb/html/view.cgi-home.html-.html

[overall]

David,

It looks like you are hand laying track using a bare hard drawn copper wire as a third rail. Do you have problems with pick up roller contact ?

George

[lionelsoni]

I think he uses ordinary annealed electrical wire. Right, David?

[FJ and G]

Bob, George,

Sorry didn't answer sooner but this topic moved quickly to page 4!!!

It is copper grounding wire from Romex cable. At 14 gauge, it is more than adequate to supply power and the roller doesn't have any problems with it as there are no sharp edges. It's a great conductor.

The "nails" used to hold it up are themselves 14 ga romex copper grounding wire, cut diagonally for the nail point with pliers and top portion is soldered to leave a very small footprint.

You could use copper roofing nails instead but I didn't want heads showing.

I put these nails every 3rd tie but better to go every other tie (wood ties).

Rails were bend to shape. OGR requested I write a story about it. I did 6 months ago & haven't heard from them. I'll have to contact them again and tell them that I'll submit it to CTT if I don't hear from them :-).

Here's another photo:

[Jumijo]

QUOTE: Originally posted by graz

I used stacked sheets of styrafoam for the larger "east side" mountain on my layout. I then used crumpled sheets of newspaper stacked and taped together for the "westside" mountain.
I found the styrafoam method to be very:
messy ( static cling reallly adds to the fun of the styrafoam shavings)
slow - even using a hot wire cutter was pretty slow.
more expensive - you can go through quite a few sheets for a large mountain and it requires a lot of cutting and fitting to get the basic shape done before carving begins.

Both methods provided the same level of final product.
Here's a link to some photos.
Mike
http://home.comcast.net/~graz6/wsb/html/view.cgi-home.html-.html

Graz,

I've admired your layout for some time now, and have had it bookmarked as a source of inspiration. Great job, and thanks for sharing it with us via photographs.

Jim

[Anonymous]

Thanks Jim. I've recently moved the layout to the other side of the basement which allows better access on all four sides. After the holidays, I intend to jump into some modifications to the trackplan and scenery.

[Anonymous]

Graz said: "I found the styrafoam method to be very:
messy ( static cling reallly adds to the fun of the styrafoam shavings)" The trick is to used extruded foam usually sold in Home improvement stores as 2' x 8' and 3/4 or 1-2-3" thick. Usually blue or pink in color. Much less messy and stronger than styrafoam. Dave

[Anonymous]

Actually, I did indeed use the blue sheet styrafoam for my mountains. It was still very messy when shaped with a Stanley Shurform (spelling?) tool. Carving it with a hot wire wasn't messy but it was much slower than I expected.

[Jumijo]

I made a mountain/tunnel on our layout using the 2" extruded foam board and found it easier than the wadded up newspaper, but what I did was grab a lot of left over chunks of the stuff and white glued it in random to the sides and top of the tunnel, then covered them with plaster cloth. I say it was easier only because I had a limited area to work with and the foam was easier to stack than the paper.

Jim