Thanks, Joe. The reason for going with the white glue makes perfect sense to me. [:)]
As I said before, this was just a practice attempt on a piece of 1 x 3. Your “finger” method went a lot easier than mine. I seemed to have more problems with static because the ballast didn’t always want to stay between the rail ties so I used a small brush to clean ballast off of things. During the summer we have the dehumidifier running in our basement so it tends to be a little dry - i.e. ~45%. I could/can adjust it though. Joe, is your train room fairly climate controlled?
My train room is in my completely finished and insulated basement, with full furnace venting around the room. We don’t have air conditioning, but typical Oregon summer temperatures are 75 - 85 degrees and typical humidity in the summer is 30%. Our house is built into a hillside, making the basement into a daylight style. The layout is in the half of the basement that’s up against the hillside, so it’s the coolest part of the house in the summer and the warmest part of the house in the winter.
So the layout is as climate controlled as any part of the house, and the temperatures stay the most consistent of any part of the house. We don’t do anything to control humidity, and that’s generally not a problem.
However, we just had a record setting heat wave – the humidity soared from it’s typical 30% to a whopping 60-70%. Temperatures soared from an average 80 degrees to nearly 100 degrees. Even worse, the temperatures did not cool down at night like usual. Typically, temperatures drop quickly after sundown into the 60s. We have a whole-house fan and we can open the windows, turn on the fan, and get a nice, cool 60-some-degree breeze flowing through the house.
Not last week during the heat wave! [xx(] Temperatures were still in the 80s overnight, and all you could do was just lay there and sweat – but with the high heat and the high humidity, things were constantly hot and sticky all night long, even with fans.
The layout suffered several minor heat buckles in the track – the track heaved up in a few spots, since the layout’s never been subjected to temperatures constantly in the 80s for days on end before. We set some all time high and low temperature records (the night time low was higher than ever recorded before, and the high was a record too)
Air conditioning may be in my future after a heat wave like that one! [B)]
Joe, my basement is also finished, but here on Vancouver Island, the soil is sandy, and we get rain seven months of the year, almost non-stop. Accordingly, I have two dehumidifiers, a light duty one that can process about 8 liters a day, and a heavy duty one. I seldom need both to run at the same time, but sometimes I must! I set them for about 50% capacity, and expect that it translates to about 50-60% ambient when they finally shout off.
I am using their proceeds to mix into the goop that you describe since I want pure water. So far, so good.
Anyway, air conditioning will do both dehumidifying and cooling, as you surely know, while the dehumidifiers warm the basement, which increases the air’s ability to take up moisture…which it does…a law of dimishing returns is realized after about 50% humidity. I have learned to live with that, since air conditioning is so much more costly, both in terms of outlay (if cental) and in operating over time.