Glad you you do Sol, me i will have to use the satnav !!!

:lol::lol::lol::cool:

[user=15]owen69[/user] wrote:

Glad you you do Sol, me i will have to use the satnav !!!

:lol::lol::lol::cool:

Me as well Owen, i have no satnav so i follow you ok :thumbs

The blind leading the blind come's to mind, mindue sooner follow you than a GWR person, who knows where we end up

Phill

Sat nav? I still use the good old A to Z!:lol:

Last night after finishing off insulating the garage roof I decided to make a start on the balasting. I have used some fish tank gravel that I got from my local pet shop. The size of the gravel looks ok for 00 gauge and at £3.50 for a very large bag it would have been rude not too! Anyhow once painted with stone fleck paint it looks ok. The balast has been stuck down using clear varnish. I have found this works realy well and have used this methord outdoors without any problems. Heres a pic after a quick spray with paint…….

Once I had balasted the track attention turned to the water in the canal. Over the years I have never realy got the hang of modeling water until now. The base of the canal is a piece of plastic sheet that is painted black on the underside. The top has been given a coat of varnish then I got a bit creative with a cable tie! As the varnish was drying I used the cable tie to shape the ripples around the boat. To speed up the drying time I used a hair dryer. This actualy shaped the ripples by itself! Heres a few pics of the result……

 

 Excellent progress. Those last few photos are brilliant:doublethumb:doublethumb

The canal looks really good!

Water looks just like any canal in parts- dirty, so I would not like to swim in it.

Effective,it is .

Any chance of gertting more light on that second picture down Dave?

Getting that satanic mill look off to a tee.

The water looks great Dave The ripples are marvellous!
 Mike

it looks deep and cold brrrrr, very effective.

:thumbs:thumbs:lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::cool:

Liking the water very efective

Oh bravo, love those scenes, spot on canal water.

Thanks for all the positive feedback guys I must be doing somthing right! Well just been given a link for some design software so I can do a track plan. Have downloaded it so I will have a looksie tonight. Here's the link for those intrested…..

http://www.anyrail.com/index_en.html

 

Really like the third image, looks as if the sun is rising, very very good, I also like the use of the Scalescences factory download, how long did it take you to build all of those.

You may or may not know Dave but the founder of that software is a forum member and has been since it was known as Drail. See this link which has information from the forum :

http://yourmodelrailway.net/view_topic.php?id=78&forum_id=30

It is a first class piece of software and easy to use. No steep learning curves. In case you don't see them this page has a couple of handy tutorials on using the software, one of them using flexitrack.

AnyRail™ - The easiest model railroad design software

Tried the software tonight. Perfect!!! Only problem is I need to register it as I can only use 50 track pieces and I ran out doing the station approch and loop line! Will have to check the balance on my paypal account tomorrow. Apart from that very easy to use only prob is I'm using peco streamline and set track bits and I can't link the two together.

You could always try sending David an e-mail asking if what you want to do is possible. Click on the members list and then D for David, you can send an e-mail from there. He is a very helpful chap.

Thanks Bob might just do that.;-)

Dave, one of the jobs I have to do (eventually) for our club's layout is improve the canal and it's surrounds. This has been constructed using a piece of high gloss clear plastic that was painted black on it's underside :exclam 

The effect I want to produce is of a breeze blown surface, just like the one in your photos. Perhaps you could give me some details of what varnish you used, how many coats and the detail of your hair dryer technique. Then I'll experiment on our exhibition layout whilst the chairman has a nervous breakdown :exclam:exclam

Hi Jeff I used clear gloss 'boat' varnish (one with big sail begins with Y that I can't spell!!) I got it for sticking the track balast outdoors. I used a plastic 'dropper' that I got from morrisons for 99p. The varnish was ' dropped' onto the plastic sheet and left a short while to dry. I then used a cable tie to make the ripples around the boat. The hairdryer was an accedent! I tried to speed up the drying time but noticed that the force of the air was actualy making waves! I had the dryer set on the slowest speed, at an angle of roughly 45' about 6" away from the surface. I only needed the one coat as the plastic sheet already gave the water some depth. I would of course test everything on a bit of scrap first before proceeding with the clubs layout though!