I am ready to begin doing some scenery. Dipping plaster cloth in water first, and putting it on the layout seems kind of messy. Has anyone just put the plaster cloth where it belongs, and sprayed it with water from a spray bottle. Seems like it would eliminate a lot of messy drips.
I have done that on my layout, It works well telling by the pictures.
Tjsingle
Thanks. That’s my plan.
Yep, I do that as well. The only thing you will find is that the cloth will shrink when you wet it. I just overlap the sections a bit and it works great. I usually spray it with “wet” water (Water with a few drops of detergent in it).
A lot of folks do it that way. Buying the plaster cloth from a medical supply house is much cheaper than using Woodland Scenics stuff. You can get odd sized remnant rolls on E-Bay REAL cheap too.
There’s not a stitch of plaster cloth on my layout. I don’t spend money if I don’t have to.
I use blue foam for all my major landforms, carve them to the appropriate shape, then spread tinted sculptamold over it like frosting a cake. It’s so un messy, half the time I’m running trains while I’m working on scenery.
The real advantage to using Sculptamold over foam is that a 3lb bag seems to last forever. I think I’ve used a total of 3 bags on my layout so far, which is roughly 36 square feet on the main section. Maybe another bag if you include the Chaffee Branch section, which I built several years ago, but haven’t installed yet. That works out to about $24 total, and I still have 3/4 of a bag on hand. I’m not sure what Woodland Scenics charges for their plaster cloth, but I bet it’s ridiculous.
Also, Sculptamold takes much longer to fully cure, although it sets up in just a few minutes. So you can go back and re-shape it, carve it, move it, what have you before you go to bed, and it’s all set in the morning. Being a paper base, it’s also very easy to re-carve once it’s dry, using nothing more than a regular Xacto knive. Plaster sets up hard, and you’ll break a lot of blades if you have to fix a boo boo.
Show us what you’re working with, I’m interested to see what you’re planning to do.
Lee