I’m working on a project and I’m attempting to locate a particular sheet of plastic. The sheet in question looks like corrugated metal. The material I’m showing has been painted but the plastic is white. The piece pictured is a sample piece a client gave me that he used on a previous project. Sadly he doesn’t recall where he got it or who manufactured it. I can tell you that from valley to valley is .125"
What I need to know is who sells this material, what the proper name is, and sizing. To me this looks like corrugated metal, but I’m unsure if it’s HO or O scale. Thank you all very much for helping me with this. I figured the experts here would probably know.
Evergreen Plastic makes a corrugated sheet with .125" spacing. But from the pics I found in a Google search, the grooves look a bit squarish instead of a smooth sine wave pattern.
Evergreen’s styrene sheets are always smooth on the back on textured on one side.
They have similar corrugated sheets though.
The sheet in the photo in the first post could be from Plastruct, they also make various textured sheets and tend to be formed in a way that leaves the back of the sheet with some texturing as well.
It’s also possible that the sheet was made by a third manufacturer I’m not familiar with, but if you’re just looking for a source of similar products, Evergreen and Plastruct are good options.
Also, the rib to rib spacing (which you’ve already approximately measured) is the important size information. Sometimes these strips, sheets and textured panels will be sized to a specific scale, but often a specific scale is not listed - just the actual spacing.
The actual measurements can be translated to scale measurements and most of these products can be used for multiple scales.
I too found that the sheets that Evergreen sold looked like the ribs were too flat. I spoke to my client and he said that he didn’t care if the sheet was flat on one side, but really wanted the ribs to be raised like the sample. I’ll check out Plastruct and see if their sheets are close to. I have found it very irritating that these companies don’t have angle shots of their sheets of styrene for comparison.
To help out, the measurement I gave of .125" was from the center of the valley to the parallel valley.
My LHS had a selection of corrigated sheets which I think are Plastruct. He has a mix, so I can’t be positive. The sheets are white, N (.04) and HO (.08) corrigation spacings are what I have, so .125 sounds about right for O. The sheets are .02 and .03 in thickness, respectively.
I built a shed and prefered the N spacing for my HO layout. The spacing looked much more like the type roofing I was modeling.
LIONS are cheap and cannot afford to buy sheets. Fortunately, the LION has miles and miles of ribbon type cables from discarded computers, and these make fine corrugated materials. I also use them for roll-up doors and for the catwalks along my elevated subway lines. Here is some used as a wall. Note that I installed it with silicone, and so the paint would not adhere to it properly. But then it is more prototypical this way since the paint on this particular wall is supposed to be peeling off.
The LIONS are (is?) being frugal in the proud tradition of model railroading.
The late E.L. Moore would take a sheet of corrugated material such as scribed wood and create new sheets of corrugated “metal” by taking bond paper over that maetrial and running a dried out ball point pen tip down the grooves. I think Moore might have then stiffered the bond paper with shellac.
