Horwood Brothers Gas, Oil and Service - Rail Scale Miniatures.

[ACL1504]

I didn't come out to the train shed for almost a full month after the July 27 eye surgery. One day I came out and wanted to check on the Horwood Bros. build. I wasn't to happy with what I found.

The building were fine but the pink foam and 2 ply cardboard were curled up.



I've never had this happen in the past.

[ACL1504]

I was able to push it back down but that caused a bulge in the middle. I decided to remove a portion of the Masonite fascia and glue the foam down on the plywood.

Apparently, some of the glue was holding the foam and cardboard on the edges. When I removed the fascia, the pink foam curled up even more.



Referring to the above photo, you can see a little piece of Masonite (over the 304) glued to the plywood and pink foam.

Prior to going any further, I carefully removed the three structures. Thankfully they weren't glued in place.

When I pried the Masonite off the edge of the plywood and pink foam, it all curled even more.

[ACL1504]

I used a 6 foot length of 1X4 and used Tight Grips to hold the outer edge of the foam and cardboard flat flush at the layout edge.

When I did this the other portion of the foam and cardboard wouldn't lay flat. I knew then that I wasn't going to be able to fix this. The entire area needed to be removed. I've used 2 ply cardboard over the pink foam on other areas of the layout with no curling or lifting off the plywood base.

Several things occurred to me. It was possible I didn't let the glue under the pink foam cure long enough prior to gluing on the 2 ply cardboard. It may be the glued wasn't mixed enough and water had settled on the top. I did shake the glue but maybe not enough. At this point it is a moot issue anyway.

I made the decision to remove all the pink foam and cardboard on top of the foam. I first used a #17 Xacto blade and putty knife to carefully remove all the sidewalks. I got them off with no damaged.

[ACL1504]

When all was removed, I wrapped course aluminum oxide sandpaper around a sanding block. I sanded the entire area when I had the pink foam.

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I re-applied the blue tape and vacuumed the trash.





I'll redo the area with the cardboard and not use the pink foam.

I'll show how I removed the dried cardboard from the bottom side of the sidewalks in the next update.

Done for today.

[ACL1504]

Tom,
Dang! Good lookin structure and construction methods.
Can't wait to see you get back to this. We will all be here.
Rich

Rich,

Thanks very much and I can't wait either. I'll post an update later this afternoon on the build.

Tom

[deemery]

Gosh, Tom, sorry that happened!   I'm inclined to blame the cardboard for the warping, possibly due to moisture in the glue used to connect to the foam.  

Any chance you have styrene to use where you previously used cardboard?   What kind of glue did you use between the cardboard and the pink foam?  What might work better between cardboard and foam is a solvent contact cement, but the solvent could attack the cardboard.

For what it's worth, I've seen very frustrating warp on the cardboard (high quality artist matboard) that I used behind photo backdrops.  I attached that stuff to the wall with wide double sided tape, but the moisture change in my basement between winter and summer was enough to pull the photo+matboard away from the wall.  

dave

[Rick]

Tom, sorry that happened.
Good idea to pull it all up and start over.
Hope it won't happen again.

[PRR Modeler]

That blows Tom, but as they say in the Navy " It's another chance to excel". What BS!

[Larry C]

Tom first off nice to see you back out in the Shed. What happened sucked but at least it was fixable.
Hope you don't overdue, take your time.

[elwoodblues]

Yipes Tom   I have never seen foam board to that before.  That must have been quite the shock to find.  Starting over was/is probably the best option.