Clearly there is a wide range of materials, relative quantities, how much to apply, and even how solid and robust we want our ballas to be.
I have only ever relied on yellow aliphatic resin (carpenters’ glue). I use it to spray down ground foam to fix it into place, and also for my ballast. In each case, it must be dribbleable, and sprayable. This means I eyeball it when mixing, but my guess is that it ends up being more dilute than about 4:1 in favour of the water. I do add two drops of dish detergent, and I do add three or four small pebbles to the container for shake-up in six months.
For ballast, I pre-wet with drug store 70% isopropyl alcohol. As Wayne says, it’s much more costly than using ‘wet’ water. But I save my single malts for my mouth…if you follow. [(-D]
I agree fully that the ballast, once groomed, must be pretty thoroughly penetrated throughout by some pre-wetting agent or the heavier glue mixes don’t seem to want to penetrate. At least, this has been my bane. Too thick, it runs off, and if it runs off it leaves a small trench which wasn’t there when I began to fix the ballast. [sigh]
