I am looking for an HO scale lawn sprinkler, it is so hot and dry here the grasses and trees on my layout are dying! Any body got one I can borrow? LOL Mike
A small atomizer will work. The small hoses required are available for electronic insulating purposes. The excess water will be quickly be evaporated by a small fan simulating the wind. To prevent having to model individual sprinkler heads, I suggest an underground system. The controller will need to be fabricated from old PC microprocessors as only one batch of heads can be run at a time. Should be a piece of cake![:I]
BB
My LHS is all out and Home Depot does not stock trhem. Have you tried Walmart?
Yeah Mike it’s been pretty hot and dry over your way, even worse than here. The neighbor across the tracks is putting down sod today and we were sort of wondering “what for?”
Well I hope that your fire station now has a truck in it so your volunteer firefighters can respond to the inevitable grass fires.
Ok, first we need to build an HO Hardware Store. Then we need to move the 57 Ford from the driveway of the HO home who’s lawn is drying out over to the town office building. Then our HO home owner goes in and begs the town officials to allow him to water his lawn, since he’s in HO New Fairfield CT and is afraid of the water gestapo. His request is denied. As he drives home, the hardware store has put up a sign offering 50% off lawn sprinklers and hoses. Our HO homeowner build a garden railway depicting the desert southwest. So what scale is it? GnHO?
mikesmowers; if you located an HO-Scale lawn sprinkler then you would go hunting for a source of HO-Scale water which would cause your HO-Scale grass to grow which would require you to HO-Scale go back to work!!!
I can give you the moon there mikesmowers; I just can’t give you the little red wagon to tow it around in!!!
Re-paint your backdrop. Dark clouds, and maybe some lightning. Turn down the lights and put on “Walkin’ in the Rain” by the Ronettes. Then go over to the Layouts forum and get some of the manure from Bob Grech’s stock cars for fertilizer (or just print out a couple of my posts and grind them up) and your grass will be Day-Glo green in no time.
Thanks for all the good help.
ARTHILL
I do not have a LHS so I will take your word that they are all sold out. I have got to go to Lawton today on busisness and I will look at WM for the lawn sprinklers, I wonder what dept. they would be in, lawn dept, or the crafts dept. Thanks ART
ONE TRACK MIND
Yes I do have a new fire station but no fire trucks as of yet, not even a fire extinguisher but I am still looking Thanks Mike
Quote from HEdward: “Ok, first we need to build an HO Hardware Store.”
Can’t help you with that. I have an N scale hardware store. Actually, it is a store that carries general hardware but specializes in chain saws, buzzsaw blades, and even has a few new old-time two-man saws. Most of their old backbone-and-muscle operated saws are antique curiosities displayed to attract eyeballers and jawbones, who they hope to make customers.
Located in a lumbering area with plenty of rainfall, so not much in the way of watering equipment. My NEXT pike will be located in a coastal area where there is irrigated rice farming just 10 miles or so inland. I am not sure I will have space to model a rice field with irrigation equipment (I have collected the research photos and a few possible parts) but maybe I can work in a store with some irrigation equipment. However, it will still be N scale.
Continuing quote from HEdward: “Then we need to move the 57 Ford from the driveway of the HO home who’s lawn is drying out”
This sounds familiar- except that the home with the drying out lawn is in N scale on my layout. There is the 57 Ford out in front. (Hey, I took this weeks ago, didn’t know this thread was coming…) However this home belongs to a family that doesn’t care BEANS about how their yard looks… Mr. and Mrs. Messy and the Messy kids. Hey, a home is for hanging out, not showing off. Your 57 Ford is
So Leighant, do you have any photos of the New Fairfield CT Water Gestapo? Poor Mr Brownlawn is terrified of those people.
The neatest neatnicks always manage to find themselves next door to the piggies, don’t they?
Representing the spray of water might be a bit daunting, but it seems like a lawn-sprinkler setup might be a cheap and easy model. Starting with some very light-gauge wire (.010-.020 diameter) painted garden-hose green, running from the edge of a modeled house to the middle of the lawn, one could make a sprinkler head out of any number of small widgets–the easiest might be the head of a pin, painted a brass color. Simulate a bit of dampness by painting the lawn with some Glosscote (maybe with a bit running across the sidewalk and into the gutter) and you’ve got enough to suggest a bit of lawn maintenance, costing only pennies and taking a few minutes to model.
Let’s hear it for gravel “greenery.” That, and one sorry little palm tree, is what separates my house from the sidewalk here in the dessicated suburbs of Sin City. (Would you believe 3% relative humidity?)
Back on topic, you could mount a very slow speed motor vertically under one of those rotating sprinklers, then simulate the sprays with some fine-fibered material (or crinkled cellophane) stiffened with wire (possibly an extension of the model sprinkler arm.) The two-armed version would probably be stronger and easier to model than the three-armed version. If the spray pattern impinges on pavement, a dark arc appears, and overspray could end up as a narrow strip of cellophane running down the street against the curb.
To complete the scene, on the “Water Gestapo” theme, add a pickup with the logo of the local water district on the door parked at the curb, and a uniformed type at the householder’s door handing out a citation for watering between the hours of 11AM and 7PM. Around here, it’s $50 for a first offense.
Chuck (whose yard isn’t even growing weeds)
Nice to see someone took this topic seriously. Although Leighant did post a great photo of a care vs no care lawns in N.
Edit to add: If this “Water Gestapo” idea catches on, will Walther’s come out with a scenemaster set? If they do, I suggest a van with the New Fairfield CT town logo lettered WATER POLICE. Calling them the water Gestapo wasn’t even my idea. I was thinking more in line with “water mafia” but my wife thought the mobsters weren’t that greedy.
There might even be ways to “cute up” such a scene by including a couple of miniatures of kids dancing around in bathing suits in the path of the sprinkler. My layout models high summer in a part of the country that hits 100+ degrees in hot months, so maybe I’ll have to get the sprinklers going on my own layout!
I get the feeling you’ll have yours done before Mowing Mike.
A quick check on Walthers site shows three (3) HO scale hardware stores but no sprinkers.
http://www.walthers.com/exec/search?category=Structure&scale=H&manu=&item=&keywords=hardware+store&instock=Q&split=30&Submit=Search
How about fiber optic strands to simulate the water - arcing from an oscillating sprinkler like this:
http://home.howstuffworks.com/sprinkler.htm
Well, if a wealthy or upper middle class neighbourhood, or a commerical or institutional building sometime after the mid-1960s, model a really nice thick lawn, and in the corners of the lawn add some Nut/Bolt castings (perhaps 0 scale ones for HO, HO scale ones for N) painted weathered black or anodized bronze/black.
