layout New layout project: Sakuragi no yu sen

[Kingmeow]

Please have good ventilation!

 

I have read that the colored stuff (at least here in the US) can give off toxic fumes when cut with a hot knife or wire.  The majority we use here is pink and made by Dow Corning.  We find them mainly in Home Depot (big box store selling home improvement stuff and tools).  There's another type that is greenish blue that's carried by Lowes (similar to Home Depot).  I don't remember what company makes that.

 

In terms of how toxic I don't know but I've read don't cut it in an enclosed basement or room.

 

There is also white foam, the stuff used to make coffee cups.  Those supposedly is not toxic when cut hot.

 

Again, this is what I've read on some of the model railroad forums.  How true it is I don't know as I didn't research it deeply but it's better to be safe than sorry.  Any plastic type material giving off fumes can't be good for you!

[cteno4]

All polystyrene foams (expanded or beaded/closed cell) make the same toxic fumes when cut with a hot knife. You need to be doing your cutting outside with some air movement via wind or a small fan drawing the fumes away from you. It’s not recommended you do this inside your apartment! This is the big drawback of using hot knifes and wires.

 

hot knifes tend to melt the foam a lot more than hot wire cutters as the knife edge stays in contact with foam edge a lot more than the thin wire and thus make a lot more fumes. Also since a knife melts the edge the foam a lot more it can harden and be hard to then do finer shaping with rasps or sandpapers. Hot wires though can be a lot harder to manipulate in cutting larger pieces.

 

Do be careful handling the hot edges of just cut polystyrene as the melted polystyrene there may look solid but is just glazed over and still cna be melted under the glaze and pushing on it with a finger can result in melted polystyrene oozing out and sticking to your fingers. It’s a bad burn as not like the stove and pulling your finger away the heat goes away and it also melts into your skin and hard to wipe off. Polystyrene foam is a very good insulator so little heat is lost into the foam it is mostly lost to the air side.

 

All these are the reasons I just don’t do hot cutting of foam anymore and just go at it with serrated knives, rasps, and sandpaper and use a simple light mask and the vacuum cleaner a lot. I like to texture foam by hand and the melted edges just make it difficult to do that.
 

The different colors of the expanded polystyrene sheets is just done to indicate manufacturers, all the same basic stuff.

 

jeff

[SL58654号]

Lesson learned. I'm no longer using the hot knife. Just hand tools from this point on. 

[cteno4]

Sorry we should have been clearer those fumes are not good things to be around inside. The good news is that other than a few organic solvents in glues and paints you might encounter, the burning polystyrene fumes are about the worst you will ever encounter in the hobby!

 

it’s totally fine if outside or in a big indoor area like a garage with some ventilation, but in a small apartment I would not do it in your living space.

 

When carving and sanding, just keep vacuuming as you go along and it tends to keep the dust down. But even then I’d say do as much as you can outside if you can just to avoid having to continually clean it up in your living space. Serrated knives (try the 100yen store for some) works very well and tends to make a lot less annoying dust than a hand or electric saw does.

 

you can create a lot of nice looking stuff just carefully sculpting the foam and then painting it, but it’s one of those scenery things that varies a lot from one pair of hands to another. Many just do the rough form of the terrain and then cover in plaster cloth, plaster, paper mache, scultimould, ground goop (vermiculite and white glue mix), etc as sculpting foam is not their thing. Take a hunk of foam and practice some and see if you can get the results you want, if not just use the foam as the rough base and try some of the covering options to see what speaks to your hands.

 

if you find the foam just too annoying you can always just layer up corrugated cardboard sheets like a contour/topology map. Start with the bottom layer(s) and hack into shape and pin down, then just keep repeating with more layers. Then fill in the steps with plaster, joint compound, ground goop, sculptimould, etc. avoids the foam dust but but more planning and fiddling required.

 

scenery is the one place where folks can really get frustrated as it’s so dependent on the person. I’ve seen and personally experience one technique work fantastically for me or others and failures for others and other techniques visa versa! Even for similar techniques this is true—Plaster cloth, I hate it, but I like paper mache, others just the opposite! Luckily for most scenery things there are numerous approaches/techniques and just have to experiment some to find out which one speaks to your hands! The key is to experiment a lot, it pays off big time! So many folks launch into large scenery projects with little experimenting and things flub up and they get very frustrated. It’s the main point I’ve folks get so frustrated and stalled and then, sadly, end up leaving the hobby. It’s also a period you usually can t run trains much and this also sucks some enjoyment out of the hobby for many so set up a loop on the kitchen table with to keep playing with your trains. It’s the biggest choke point I’ve seen for folks in the hobby once they get going on a layout.
 

oh yes and with scenery be prepared for things to get dirty in your work space as well as tracks and such. If you can avoid attaching your track as long as possible that is good, especially points. Once track is in place put tape over it while working on scenery and be especially careful around the points. Don’t do any really liquid techniques (like flooding ballast with dilute glue) around points as it can get into them potentially (around points you can paint on thicker glue that won’t wick into parts and gently place ballast into the glue). Small bits of scenery material also seem to jsut get magnetically drawn into points so don’t let that crap build up. Plastic tarps on the floors as well as scenery crap seems to fly everywhere while you work on it. There are also a ton of little hand held cordless vacuums these days for $5-20 that work great at layout cleanup. The benefits of them are it’s hand held and don’t have to keep minding where the vacuum hose is draping on things on the layout, simpler to use so you will grab it more often to cleanup as you go, and if you do suck up a part you want back it’s easy to find it in the little catch chamber (with using the big vacuum I always stretch a piece of nylon stocking across the hose at some point to catch parts before going into the vacuum bag).

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Beaver]

I find the best hand tool for cutting foams, expanded foams, polystyrenes etc is a razor saw with the finest teeth you can get. The tiny teeth will not catch on or tear foam particles and very little force is required, so the cuts are very accurate and do not distort the foam.

[SL58654号]

9 hours ago, Beaver said:

I find the best hand tool for cutting foams, expanded foams, polystyrenes etc is a razor saw with the finest teeth you can get. The tiny teeth will not catch on or tear foam particles and very little force is required, so the cuts are very accurate and do not distort the foam.

Then I think that's what I'll go with! Thanks.

[SL58654号]

To add to the sturdiness as well as reduce stress on the wooden dowels (which are the only things holding the control panel built, admittedly rather anomalously, out of solid wood beam stock) I bought these iron angles that I plan on attaching underneath via screws so that any weight from leaning on the control panel won't come to any detriment of the structural integrity of my layout table. After all, I want this whole thing to be built to last. 

 

Afterward, it's finally time to make serious progress on the landscaping.