Ballast and Plaster Mountains


D

Dougget

Member
Two unrelated questions. The first is a follow up from the Paper Mache thread. Sounds like traditional (glue or flour) paper mache is not the best option. I was considering it because I have two kids that would love to help with the layout and "mountain building" seems like a great opportunity.

So, what about using the paper mache method (strips of paper + something sticky) with plain paper towels cut into strips and plaster? I'm thinking it would be the same exact process as mache, but have better structure due to the use of plaster vs glue/water. This would all be over stacked foam or packing material for structure.

For my ballast question... I read that one of the big model ballast producers uses ground walnut shells as their ballast medium. I also know that ground walnut shells are used as sand blasting medium and I can get a 25# bucket for about $25. Has anyone tried using bulk ground walnut shells? It even comes in different grits so you can get the right size :)

Thanks,
Doug
 
I made some mountains out of plaster of Paris and paper towels and found it rather difficult and messy. I had much better luck with carving foam insulation. I got all my foam as scrap from construction sites. If you tell the foreman what you want, they are usually more than generous.

AS for the walnut husks, you could I suppose, if you could get the texture you want, but the ballast is very fine in HO scale. Then you would have to find a way of coloring it. It might be more trouble than it is worth, but let us know if you try it.
 
If you want to use Plaster, Plaster cloth is relatively cheap, and easy to use, and a bit less messy then plaster on paper towels.

However, the foam method mentioned is much easier.
 
I've used just about every scenery method you can think of and paper towel or newspapers strips soaked in plaster works fine but it makes a hellacious mess so you need drop clothes everywhere and have to cover the rest of the layout to keep off the plaster drips.

The plaster casting bandage method is a lot better than the first method but it's still messy and you have to go through almost as much prep work to protect the layout and layout room.

Extruded foam insulation is by far the best way to go. You can build your entire mountain on your workbench and then just set it in place and blend in the scenery. You confine all the mess to one place and the results look really good once you get used to how to carve the foam and fill in in the layers with something like patching plaster. I'll bet the kids would have a lot more fun doing that than dripping plaster all over themselves. I know your wife would like it a lot better. :)

Unless you have a huge layout, the cost of ballast is a very minor item. The ballast makers that use ground walnuts also do a a lot of grinding and coloring to get the ballast to look right. It really helps the realism of the layout if you have several different colors of ballast. I have a black and white granite for my mainline, a rust slag ballast for my side tracks, and cinders for my yard trackage. This is how it looks on the real thing. I'd buy ballast based on the colors you want for the area you're modeling and forget about getting a huge amount of walnut husks. I'm pretty sure the total cost of ballast for my 36 square foot layout was less than $20 and I still have some left over.
 
Jim is right about the ballast . It is cheap and I would not bother with trying to grind up the walnut shells and dying them !
 
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