Hi guys,
I want to know how to ballast track.
I know to keep ballast off the ties,(espiacally on switches!)
But do I spray on the glue with track in place, or do I use a paintbrush to brush it on?
Hi There;
First spred your ballast & then use a small brush to even it out. Spray with a mix of water with a couple of drops of dish detergent mixed in. don’t spray directly on the ballast let the spray fall like a mist on the track. The mix up a 50/50 mix of white glue & water & use an eye dropper to apply the water/glue mix to hold everything in place. Instead of an eyedropper I use a syringe like you use for giving medicine, Hope this helps.
also, in spite of what you see and hear in other forums and in magazines and things; always ballast AFTER the ground cover is down. That way, it looks as if the ballast went down on top of the grass or whatever; which; of course it does in reality.
I use the same procedure Tom described, except that I use rubbing alcohol insted of a water/detergent mixture to wet the ballast, and I thin the white glue with four parts water to one part glue. The alcohol penetrates the ballast better than any water mixture I’ve tried, and the thinner glue mixture also soaks in better. You don’t need a lot of glue, but you do need it to completely saturate the ballast. Thicker glue mixtures sometime bead up on top of the ballast. The solution to that is to spray the glue with more water (or alcohol), but it makes sense to me to make the glue thinner to start with. My favorite glue applicator is a white glue bottle. Save an empty or empty a new one, because its nozzle will do a good job of controlling a small but sufficient stream of glue. To keep ballast off the ties and rails, a) don’t use any more ballast than absolutely necessary, and b) make sure it’s where you want it before applying the alcohol and glue. It also helps to use gentle sprays to soak the ballast, and to apply the glue in thin streams. Joe Fugate’s article “How to ballast and weather track,” in our “How To build Realistic Layouts” special issue, covers all of this and more step by step. Good luck, Andy
If you can get back into the old forum archive do a search with “ballast” and you will find tons of ideas… then you copuld post and tell us how on earth to get back to that stuff PLEASE!
There’s also tons of stuff I’ve posted on ballast…
Have a nice day [:P]
Thanks guys.
But does the WS Scenic cement work for this?