The rough pasture matured long enough beside its prototype photo to gain hash marks where material needed to be added or removed. So, with the weather increasingly bucolic and locomotive projects winding down for now, I mixed up a batch of Celluclay in the hopes of making the model look a little more like its inspiration.
I used Celluclay because I have a big bag of it on hand, but like every other material it has pluses and minuses. On the plus side, it is light and flexible, which are desirable when making a section that will be lifted off and onto the layout many times over the decade it is likely to take to complete it. On the minus side, it’s harder to make it smooth than plaster, takes days to set and it shrinks substantially while drying. The shrinkage precipitated several coats to cover the livestock-swallowing gaps and gashes in the styrofoam and lifted the back few centimetres of styrofoam away from the plywood.
After much puttering, it was smooth in the main. A final sanding with 80-grit in my palm sander brought it to smooth enough, covered our nice clean deck with paper dust, and took a big chunk out of the hill near the creek. Overnight rain appears to have solved the dust problem and a little more Celluclay has filled the divot.
Pembroke:87 