Making Removable Model Railroad Structures
MRA EditorsDescription
Cleaning and maintaining your model railroad layout can be a long and painstaking process, especially when it comes to those tight corners and smaller objects. Dust, dirt and grime build up over time, and if you want to keep your layout in tiptop shape without losing your patience, it’s important to find ways to ease the process. It can be particularly difficult to care for your model railroad structures, but over the years we’ve learned a variety of quick little tricks to take the stress out of working with those intricate model railroad structures on our layouts. In this lesson, we teach you an essential tip that will simplify the way you create, clean and work around your model railroad structures.
Creating removable model railroad structures
One of the keys to getting the most out of model railroading is to make your job easier whenever you can. There’s no room for stress in a hobby, and that should be especially true for modeling. To ease one part of the process, we’re going to show you how to better manipulate and maintain your model railroad structures with one of Bob Hayden’s expert techniques. He and Allen Keller take a closer look at Bob’s layout to discover how he keeps his scenes looking so pristine.
Here’s the secret to Bob’s success: rather than working around his model railroad structures, he makes them removable and just works right through them. He teaches you a few different ways to create detachable model railroad structures in order to clean and manipulate your scenes. The biggest benefit to this quick trick is that if you don’t like the placement of your model railroad structures or you want to touch up the details on a certain building, you can easily pull it off and make your adjustments without having to worry about cutting away glue or ruining your scene. See how this expert tip works on your next layout!
One of the things you can do to save the work that you put into your layout is make the buildings removable. That way if you move or you change something on the layout, your building isn't stuck there forever. What I do with a structure like this is to build a foundation of Sculptamold, and while the Sculptamold is still wet, I stick the structure down into it. Then I remove the structure when the stuff is set, but before it's dried completely. There's scenic around it so you can't see where the foundation meets the layout. Now, another use for removable structures is to make it possible to clean the layout. Under this wharf is a fairly difficult place to clean. I would say. So I've made it so it comes apart for cleaning. Wow, look at that. That's novel. Can sit over there. And then you just come in there with your brush and you can clean out the whole thing. This piece comes out as well. Then you can take a soft brush and get all the dust bunnies out from underneath the wharf. The lift-out structure approach is particularly handy for foreground buildings, because you may have to get in there and work behind them from time to time.
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Love this video!