Thanks Pat!
I don't know if you guys enjoy my journalistic ramblings or not… but I enjoy it. Most of this afternoon was spent in this.
Kentucky has a real estate tax for cars (and boats too) based on 1% of the blue book value as of January 1 of each calendar year. It's a funny tax since it basically dis-incents you from buying a new car since the older the car gets the less tax you pay. With the Covid rules, you had to wait outside the County Clerk's Office until your number was called. I waited in the high-humidity heat for almost 2 hours. The transaction when I finally got in the door took about five minutes. I'm telling y'all this because it curtailed my shop time, but… there's good news. I still had enough time to get all of the Sculptamold applied for the second plaster layer and got the other Fairbanks Morse block half off the printer and it was better than the first.
First the print. The black smudge is from black acrylic on my gloved hand left over from mixing up a plaster batch in the layout room. The coolant pipe actually printed unattached to the long header which is why it disconnected on the first block. It's a drawing error. I proactively added a Bondic joint there so it wouldn't be stressed during cleaning. I also did the same thing to the bracket at the other end, reinforcing it with Bondic. It worked. The picture was taken before final sanding, but after post curing. It's a great print! It's even better than the first. The first had a little distortion at the far extremity of the base flange. This one has no distortion anywhere. The generator, exhaust stacks and front end are on the printer now, but I have another print set up for the blower and exhausts with an improved exhaust support scheme. We'll see which one comes out best. The base for this engine is a large two-part print that the other engines didn't have.
The Hacker's site now has all the plaster it's going to get. It took several batches to cover all of it. My recipe: about 2 cups of water, five seconds of squirts from the W-S Earth Base tint, and then 3.5 to 4 handfuls of Sculptamold. The tint really gives the plaster some color. Even though it will be painted when adding the ground cover, having it tinted earth color means any chipping will not show up bright white. I was liberal in slathering the plaster onto the hydrocal base coat, filling in all the insconsitencies and making the slopes more uniform. I was careful in blending the plaster into the now completely rigid path surface.
To ensure that I can find the openings for the cabin's legs, I inserted basswood splints into the foam and the laid the plaster around them. It took a lot of patience to get the actual part of the site where the house would sit level enough to work.
I used a combination of putty knives, a wooden paint stirrer and then my gloved wetted finger. On one of the slopes I applied some cast rocks which I was making concurrently with using the Sculptamold. It was tinting the plaster for these rocks where I acquired the black acrylic used to tint the Hydrocal.
Putting down the road surface first was the right way to approach this since it gave me a clear demarcation line between road and terrain. I'm still not sure how I'm going to rut the road a bit and show some usage.
Again, I can't believe it's Friday again. Weeks go by way too fast for me. It's almost disturbing. But every day, there's something new in the basement that I created that wasn't there the day before. It's one of the reasons why the hobby we're in is so rewarding. There's always something new that's being created. We're just not marking time.
I was also ruminating on the amount of plaster that my railroad now comprises. Between plaster and ballast, there's a couple hundred pounds of added weight besides the mass of OSB and structural lumber. Whoever dismantles this beast is going to need C4 and a couple of dumpsters to haul it all away. When I built the first iteration in Germany, it was just track, plywood and some structure. Now it's a completely different animal.
