Recently i briefly looked at an article i believe was in model railroader about using fine sawdust, craft paint, and rubbing alcohol to make ground cover but i cant remember where can someone point me the right direction please.
Thank you
LION cannot point you in the right direction, he has four paws and they all point in different directions.
Yes, LION has used saw dust for scultping land forms. Him found that cardboard dust works even better. Just go you your table saw and cut off 1/16" with each pass. Be sure you wear goggles, a respirator, and ear protection. Try not to cut off any fingers. The ER does not like it when people do that.
LION collected these in a big bag. Him got some color fro the hardware store. Him picked out some nice color and tells the clerk that him wants this color. Clerk looks at LION like him has two heads. I give him an empty gallon pottle and says to put it in here. So I buy the color and then add water to it to fill the gallon.
I put some of the paper dust in a five gallon bucket, I add walpaper paste, and then mix in come clean water. LION uses Latex gloves (No latex alergies for this LION), and him mixes a nice paste, them him adds some of the colored water. If too thick add more water, if too thin add more dust.
Now how to put this on the railroad. We had some old chicken wire in the attic above the power house (you dont have a power house?–no matter, the chicken wire was a bad idea, it cut up my nice furry paws.) So you get some plastic netting and you prop up your mountains with sticks and stuff like that, then you can apply your paste to the mountains.
That red crap in the foreground is saw dust. You can see that I used real live rocks for the rocks.
I used green paper mache for the green hills and now I am applying some gray stuff to make some rocky hils for the train to disappear into.
YOU GOTTA BE CAREFUL WITH THIS STUFF. As it dries it like to lift up a little bit and derail passing trains. When it dries it will aso leave holes, but this is the bottom layer of your scenery, and so these at least will be covered with other ground covers. (like those trees).
Sounds a bit like ground goop which also includes vermiculite. No experience with that, but google ground goop or seach this forum for goop
LMAO!thank you lion
There was actually an article in RMC ([:|]), in the May 2017 issue. It was by Joseph Kreiss, of Big Island Rail fame. He uses MDF sawdust, green paint, and rubbing alcohol to make old-school sawdust ground foam.
Thats where i saw ot thank you
Haven’t read the article yet, but in my youth, Rit dye and sawdust were my go to for todays ground foam.
Have fun,
Richard
While working on my current layout, I got the idea of mixing papier mache powder with sawdust from the collection bag under my table saw to use as ground cover. The recipe is simply sawdust mixed about 3 to 1 with papier mache powder. I found that I could easily apply an average 1/8" thick layer of this goop wherever I wanted open ground on my layout. It went down pretty fast, was relatively clean, and dried to a very hard and durable surface that could be sanded and even carved like wood. Best of all, this simple ground goop was cheap and does not shrink the way other papier mache type products tend to do. While you could always tint this mix with paint, it already dries to a tan color (no white chips). If you want a very uniform consistency to your sawdust, I found that sawdust created by cutting fiber board products works best. I took some scrap pieces of thick fiber board I had laying around and made rip cut after rip cut to fill the catch bag with very uniform size sawdust and then filled a plastic bag with it. Whenever I need more ground goop, I just pull out this bag and mix some of this sawdust with some papier mache. About the only downside is that you need a drill when planting trees/poles/fences due to the hardness of the resulting ground cover.