I’ve looked at it, but didn’t buy any. The barbs are grossly out of scale, and are possibly a scale 9" long! Oh, and the wire’s flat; completely unrealistic.
The best way to model barbed wire is to not model the barbs. For really thin wire, I’d use disassembled 22 AWG stranded wire.
You’re thinking about T posts and hotwire. If you REALLY want to be realistic, use the smallest T rodding Evergreen or Plastruct makes, add some small round rod as insulators (white or yellow) and use the disassembles 22 AWG stranded wire for wire. It’d be a tedious to assemble, but visually very nice, fence. Thankfully, I’m modeling 1950, so most of my fences will be 4" round posts, Tulle-simulated hog wire fencing, and one strand of barbed wire!
As I stood outside of work on Friday,across the tracks about 80’ or so there was barbed wire on top of a chainlink fence and from that distance it was hard to really see barbs, so in HO scale I would say it’s safe to use very fine monofiliment fish line or even .008 brass and not worry about barbs.
ROCO military models sell barbed wire in rolls for use on a model battlefield. Walthers #625-317. Never saw the stuff but maybe the rolls could be straighten out.
Art,
Found two citations at the Index of Magazines using “barbedwire” as the keyword search term:
Modeling barbed wire Railroad Model Craftsman, May 1985, page 95
( BARBEDWIRE, “BURGESS, JACK”, FENCE, RMC )
Creating a Farm Scene True to Life Scenery for your Model Railroad, page 53 Making furrows; Growth on the field; Barbed wire; Post and rail fence ( BARBEDWIRE, FARM, FENCE, SCENERY, “ZMUDA, ALEXANDER” )
Haven’t checked my copy of the Burgess article issue yet, and am not familiar with the Zmuda book.
Bob
NMRA Life 0543
One strategy I have seen for barbed wire is simply using fine thread–it is “rough” enough to suggest the barbs (especially after being painted, dull aluminum-gray for new bobwire, rust for old bobwire) and inexpensive–some old toothpicks and a roll of cheap black thread and you can bobwire in the back 40!
Hi .For barb wire I use fine winding wire that I raparound a thin rod then spread out and run a small roller over it to flatten in loops. Its a bit slow in the making but looks quite good.By the way I model in “N” gage
South Australian outline,The layout “Coonalplyn Downs” made up of 17 modules operated with DCC.
Regards, Ledzeplyn
I’m not sure where the writer saw that I used fish line with knots in it for barbed wire but in my “Basic Scenery” book I listed the “Scale Link Company” in Dorset , DT11 8QN, United Kingdom, (0044) 1747-811817 as a source of etched brass barbed wire. I believe you can still contact them over the internet at (www.scalelink.co.uk). I have purchased items from them using a credit card with no problem.
For an electric fence I’d use the round electric fence posts instead of T posts,because it’d be easier to get them straight, and you could probably find some brass rod. However, to be exactly right it’d have to be a scale 3/8".
But, when I built my fence I used bamboo skewers for posts and tied a knot about every 1/4 inch in gray thread. You really can’t see them, but the barbs are there.
My appologies to Lou Sassi,it was Frary and Hayden book, using fishline and cutting every other tooth from a comb as a jig, but I think just fishline would do.
Hi all,
Here’s some information I have gleaned on modeling barbed wire.
I have a Scale Link barbed wire fret SLF062. It costs 8.5 pounds plus a 17.5% VAT. In US$, that works out to about $17.45 for the fret (shipping not included). You get 33.57 actual feet of “wire” which works out to 52 cents per foot. I bought mine from Neal’s Engaging Trains in '95 for $13 US. It has a “wire” thickness of about .005" and quadruple barb spacing on 4" centers. From a distance the barbs disappear, yet the wire still looks like barbed wire.
I picked up several HO scale Yesteryear Creations barbed wire fence packs on ebay in '00 for around $5 each (retail was $19.95 then). You get 15.24 actual feet of “wire” at a cost of $1.31 per foot. Their “wire” is .01" thick with double barbs spaced at 8". It is fairly coarse compared to the Scale Link material. If I were going to use this material, I’d recommend the N scale product for HO scale.
I ran across a chain link fence kit by TLH Scenics. Based on the photo, their barbed wire looked pretty realistic. The actual kit, close to $10 with the shipping, was a bag containing steel wire (for posts), a plastic mesh for the fence that looks like window screening, and some metallic thread for the barbed wire. There are no barbs on the “wire”. It consists of a stranded thread with a metallic foil spiral wrapped around it.
I showed it to my wife and asked her if she had anything like it. “Sure”, she said, and produced a 200 meter spool of the stuff. I just checked at Hancock Fabrics and it runs from 0.4 to 3/4 of one cent per foot. Granted, theirs may not be the #40 size that matches what came in the kit and it sure isn’t going to come in rust or weathered zinc, but for my money (and I’ve spent a fair amount of it buying products on spec) this may be the way to go. It is certainly cheap enough to warrant a try.
I don’t feel that plain wire is a realistic substitute. Real barbed wire is a twisted pair and j