Poolside Rails

“What was that?” asks the CEO. He draws ferociously on his cigar. “A success? On our railway?”

“Must be a type,” quips the CFO.

“No, I proofread it twice,” says the PR Guy. “I couldn’t believe it myself!”

As you’ll recall from our previous adventures, we’ve been testing the efficacy of a water-based coating on a Styrofoam structure. Now, before you tut-tut and cluck (if you’re a chicken you may feel free to tut-tut and cluck), let us consider the problem at hand:
A: No funds to hand
II: Paints on hand either a) attack the Styrofoam, or True)run right off it
3: This attempt at a silly numbering scheme isn’t working at all! But you        can see what I was trying for, can’t you?

I figure we’re learning this garden railway building thing together, am I right? I reckon we’re learning this blogging thing together too, aren’t we? I mean, really, who knows anything about blogs except folks like us that are flying by the seat of our pants? So we may as well learn about comedy writing together too, huh? Kind of follows, doesn’t it? I think our lesson for today is to jump ship when a premise doesn’t work.  Nobody likes to see a writer beat a dead horse. Or a live horse. It’s just not pretty. So, when your idea doesn’t stand up, knock it down.  If you have to work to explain your premise chances are good it’s too arcane for the average reader. Arcane. Look it up.

Anyway, it rained on my China Bridge, the 7th Wonder of the Styrofoam world. The wonder, of course, is how something so shoddily built can still be standing! The north side of the bridge is covered in a super thick paste of “heavy” acrylic paint…that’s the paint from the bottom of the bottle, with most of the water removed. I stippled it onto the ol’ Styro to see if it would stick…it Stuck! The south side is a combination of the stipple method and a plaster of Paris slurry I shlopped on there. The deck itself features only the P of P slurry.

And the winner…I’ll tell you in a minute. I was just thinking about that snide joke about the bridge being shoddily  built. I think I’ve fallen into a rather bad crevasse, and I could use your help in getting out of it.

I’m always testing ideas. Like the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler. It’s a huge pile of tests; can you put a car R/C into a battery powered locomotive? Can you shorten the wheelbase on a locomotive and have it work? Will a shortened-wheelbase heavy locomotive cure the China Section track issues? Can you make an American prototype look European? For the testbed, however, the only heavyweight battery driven loco I have IS the Bachmann Big Hauler. So I wiped out a perfectly good machine to test an idea.

Fortunately, the test is working.

With dang near zero funding, though, my test units become the real deal. Like this bridge. It’s just a test to see how Styrofoam works. Because it’s a test I rather slapped it together…who’s going to waste time finishing a test that may not work? But the test appears to be working, and now I’ve got a durable finish on it. Well, now it’s a shame to waste all the work I put into that finish.  So here I am putting a good finish on a slap-dash construction. You see the problem? It’s rather horse-and-cartish, if you know what I mean.

And now the answer to the better finish: the acrylic “mud” that was stippled on. That dried in a tough, leathery surface that, as I had hoped, snugged itself down around the Styrofoam. The plaster slurry, particularly on the roadbed, seems to want to jump off the plastic of the bridge.

So, what did we learn?
A: Stupid numbering schemes aren’t funny and are hard to do
B: Keep tests simple and small, and avoid the temptation to cut up good  things to test theories
C: A slurry of “heavy” acrylic paint will stick when applied in a thick stipple pattern

Now comes the debate about whether or not to keep the existing bridge structure or replace it with something…something more…well, neater, for one thing! I’ll let you know!

All right, I’ll tell you the truth: Ferrari S.A. didn’t actually donate a radio, nor did Ferrari USA. But you have to admit that’s a pretty impressive headline.

The donating Ferrari, in fact, was a really neat looking 1/20th scale red Enzo manufactured by Meijiaxin Toys Company, LTD (you can find them at www.mjxtoys.com).  It’s a remote control toy car my brother and I picked up at Toys R Us for $25…a little steeper than I was willing to pay for this project, but the cheaper units didn’t appear to have any speed control, just forward and reverse.

The project, of course, is the seemingly never-ending conversion of the Bachmann Big Hauler 4-6-0 to a Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler 4-4-0 that will be able to negotiate the tight radius turns on the Paris to Peking Railway. In hacking the two inches out of the frame length to shorten the wheelbase, I had to hack two inches out of the boiler to match.  The Big Hauler’s PC board, which accommodated not just the receiver but also sound, was three inches long and sat in the boiler…with the boiler shortened, there is now no place for the board to fit!

All right, I’ll tell you the truth: when I first started on this project I just tore into the boiler, cutting wires and pulling out pieces until I got it to the length I wanted. One of the victims of that violent attack was that PC board. I believe it works, but it’s been shorn of its wires, and now, truly, no longer fits.

But the Ferrari board is just a little one-incher. Not only that, but the Ferrari has neat LED headlights that work! We were concerned, my brother and I, that the six D Cell batteries might overpower the little board, which was designed to handle the juice from just 4 AA batteries.  As you can see from the picture, we need not have worried. Everything seems to be working fine.

All right, I’ll tell you the truth:  I didn’t do the installation myself. My brother did the electronic work quickly and excellently.  He was able to get the board to fit into the stubby front end of the boiler so that access to the power switch is gained by popping off the press-fit boiler end plate. It strikes me as rather funny that one end of the boiler pops off to reveal the board and the switch, while the other end of the boiler pops off to allow access to the batteries. Like a real locomotive, the entire structure of the boiler is in use, between the batteries and the radio. No fake empty spaces here!

The beast runs pretty well. The motion is a little herky-jerky every now and again, but I think that’s because we crammed the antenna alongside the batteries in the boiler, right over the motor. There may be a lot of EMF interference in there.  The original Big Hauler runs the antenna around the inside of the cab roof…maybe we’ll do something like that.

The idea for this project came from Kalmbach’s Tips & Tricks for your garden railway,  a supplement that came with my subscription to Garden Railways magazine.  It was inexpensive, easy (well, for me, because I didn’t do it!), and effective…the darn thing actually works!

There is just one little issue; the R/C Ferrari was designed to blink its headlights when running backwards. Take a guess at what happens to the Not-So-Big Hauler’s light in reverse!

Now, I consider myself a patient man. I don’t mind if Polly Pockets gets wedged in my LGB coaches. I don’t mind removing the occasional dog poo from the railways. I don’t mind moving the flower pots off the track so that I can run the train. I don’t mind those things.  But this, this I mind.

I come home from work and what do I find but downed power lines…not just downed power lines, mind you, because that might be acceptable, but mangled lines and quasi-dug up poles…that I just can’t handle. Why, the paint is scarcely dry on the crummily-painted poles in the first place!

Although we know the attacker is Zorro the Idiot (I used to call him the Idiot,  then changed his name to the Wonder Dog, as in I wonder what he’ll destroy next. Now he’s back to the Idiot),  I don’t believe he acted alone on this caper.

No, let’s take our ultra-cool Ray-Bans off for a moment and analyze the scene CSI-wise. Looking around the Paris Section with a flashlight, the surprise is not what we find, but what we don’t.  The stunning brunette (my wife) looks at me quizzically.

“What’s missing?” she asks, with that raised eyebrow that means she’s thinking I’m an idiot again. She may be right.

“You may have a master’s degree in Russian Literature,” I say, smugly, “but I see no poo up here.”

For effect I swing the beam of the flashlight around the crime scene. There are the downed power lines, all twisted and ruined. There’s the bent power pole, the tipped over trains, the knocked down GI Joe guys. But there is no poo.

“Perhaps he came up here to urinate,” she says, mystified.

Frankly, I love it when she speaks French. But, back to business.  There’s no wet spot. Of course things could have dried up. But I think something else happened.  Someone else is an equal partner in this little tragedy.

I don’t like cats. We have just three of the beasts now, down from a personal high of seven of the urinating, territory-marking, stinking little eating machines. Oh sure, they’re cute when they’re little. All three of our monsters are old people now, easily over a decade.

One of ‘em, Louis by name…that’s Louis, pronounced Loo-wee, as in gooey or pee-you-ee, is a nasty old fellow bequeathed to us by some friends who aren’t any more. Not that they aren’t people any more, but the friendship, strained at its best, has waned away to next to nothingness.

Louis is a nasty old codger, age 14,  who scratches at the bathroom door while I’m shaving in the mornings, preparing to drive the 43 miles to my under-funded job with the Evil Empire. He thinks he scratches at the door, but our former friends had his front paws declawed. Did I mention they were former? Anyway, he makes this pounding noise on the door every blessed morning. Does he want to say good morning? Does he come in to make me feel loved and appreciated? No. He leads me directly to his cat food bowl, which is in a windowsill to keep it away from the Idiot. He likes it when I lift him up there. Yes, your majesty.

Anyway, my firm belief is that King Louis enticed the Idiot to chase him and dashed under the power lines, knowing that Prince Ding-Dong would plunge straight through them. Why? Why would a cat do that?  If you must ask that, you obviously don’t own a cat!

I must seriously rethink this overhead power thing. I really like the look, but obviously so does Louis!

Well, now that we’ve decided upon the wiring, and we’ve got that groovy China Bridge in the surface finish test mode, it’s time to revisit the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler.  Sounds like I have a plan, doesn’t it? Well, dream on.

With the onset of winter hours…who knew they’d monkey with the clocks?…I don’t get home from working at the Evil Empire until the sun has set.  That means our exciting mid-week adventures now need to move indoors. That’s okay…there’s plenty to do!

Case in point is the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler. As you’ll recall, and maybe you will, we’re in the process of reducing a Bachmann Big Hauler from a 4-6-0 to a 4-4-0, changing its profile to a European style tank engine along the way.

Shortening the wheelbase turned out to be the easiest part of the job.  I hacked a two inch long piece out of the boiler to accommodate elimination of the forward drive wheels. The wheels came right out and everything fit back together just fine down there on the chassis. I was even able to compensate for the change in taper of the original boiler.

The cosmetic changes, however, have been a rather challenging adventure. First there was remodeling the cab…how do you make a wild west locomotive cab look like a French  teapot? Schwoops, my friend, and little round windows!

Now the time has come to build the tanks on either side of the boiler. I’ve installed nice wooden blocks to stand behind the promised plastic skin on the tanks themselves.

You know I’m cheap…

“Economy-minded” says the PR Guy at the Paris to Peking Railway Co. board meeting.

“Oh yes,” says the CEO, “that’s a dandy phrase. Let’s use that one!”

“He’s a rummy cheap bas…”starts the Chief Engineer.”

“…bastion of thriftiness,” finishes the PR Guy. “We must stay positive!”

“I’m positive he’s a rummy cheap jackanapes,” the Chief Engineer mutters into his stout. It’s only his third beer, so he’s just at the verbally challenging stage of the evening.

…even though I work a good solid day at the Evil Empire, I make a poor wage. I drive 43 miles each way each day to earn a paltry sum. My wife tells me I need to get another job…I tell her I have a pretty good job now and she says “no, another job.” As a result my discretionary funds are rather discreet, as in absolutely unavailable!

But I’m also a packrat, and have saved some of the buildings from an HO layout I had in a basement well over a decade ago. This little gem sacrificed its nice sheet styrene walls for the tank skin.

Alas, the plastic is rather old, and has gone brittle. Not only that, but the majority of the details like windows and doors are rather well cemented in and won’t pop off. Turned window-side in it works okay, but it’s not my first choice.

So, we’re started on tanks. We’ll probably find a better source for sheet plastic…I may beg a few shekels from the Budget and Finance Committee (Mrs. Turner) and go to the hobby shop…but these crummy pieces provide nice templates so that I won’t waste too much sheet plastic when we reach the time to cut!

“Nothin’ but cheap scum!” roars the inebriated Chief Engineer. “Tearing doon a nice buildin’ like that for the plastic inside! Y’ought ta be ashamed o’ yerself!”

“I think it’s a rather clever way to recycle materials,” says the CEO.

“I’ll use that,” says the PR Guy. “That’s good!”

“Can’t we just adjourn the meeting and call it day?” grumbles the CFO.

“Oh, very well,” says the CEO. “Let’s go home. Meeting adjourned.”

We’ve reached a dangerous pass on the Paris to Peking Railway, a dangerous pass.  I’ve got the cart firmly before the horse, the bull firmly by the tail so that we may face the situation…our bass is significantly ackwards.

Yes, we got the wire…26 gauge solid core wire from Fry’s. I never even thought of Fry’s as having that kind of stuff, but we were there, and, well, it was there, and, well, here we are. Wired.  Five bucks and we’re set up.

It looks okay. Not great. I imagine greatness will come over time, when I figure out how to get the wire to drape nicely and not remember the kinks and bends I induced stringing it between the poles. I know it’s green…I plan to paint it when I get it to drape correctly. Who knew draping wire was such a pain in the hoo-hoo?  Oh, it looks easy enough, and stringing it between the poles is a piece of cake. But getting it hang correctly, that’s a different fish.

You know how that creative fever gets you going? I just wanted to see if the 26 gauge wire was significant enough to carry power to the Christmas light bulbs, that’s it. Just a test.

But I had built those four prototype poles and stuck ‘em out there already. And I did really want to be sure I could transfer power from one side of the track to the other side overhead…that’s a big thrill for me. Well, naturally I had to string the wire over the poles just once, to see what it looked like and be sure that it would work.

My little girl was playing with her Polly Pockets over at the station building in the Ukraine Section and really wanted me to hang around and keep her company…not play, mind you, but keep her company.

I direct connected the 26 gauge wire from the power pack to the leads that supply power to the lights of the station. Lit up like a champ, and it really took all of 15 seconds to do. Okay, we’ll try running the wires over the poles and then connecting ‘em. Because I’d done all the prework with the plastic bead insulators, that process took all of another minute, and everything worked great.

“Daddy, aren’t you going to stay out here?”

That’s when the Idiot…I mean Wonder Dog…no, I mean the Idiot, decided to jump up on the railway and bashed into my wiring. I had rather wanted to see what would happen in that eventuality, just not quite so soon. You can see from the picture that everything is okay, just a big sag in the wires.

Another couple of minutes found that problem sorted out. But how to get power past the big stone column and over to the Ukrainian Station? Getting wiring past that sucker has been an issue since I first saw the railway, and by gum today seemed to be the day to fix it.

Imagine you were high in the mountains, running telegraph wire alongside the railroad. Here, on this bend, is a huge boulder that leaves you no clearance to place a pole. When you’re done cursing the surveyor and railroad engineer that left you such a tight pass, what do you do? The answer is easy: use the boulder instead of using poles!

Out came the Ryobi power drill, the good one, my crummy masonry drill bits, the Simul-Dremel, and the left over dowel pieces, and I got started. I drilled two holes in the mortar between the  stones of the column…well, I started to. I bought these really inexpensive, spelled c-h-e-a-p,  masonry drill bits from Big!Lots some time ago and had never had a chance to use them.  The bit started in the concrete, made maybe a 16th of an inch dimple, and then quit cutting.  I changed my pressure on the drill every way I could think of, but it made no difference. The bit went instantly dull and quit cutting. Fortunately I had bought a masonry screw kit from Lowe’s, and that included a masonry bit. THAT sucker bored a perfect hole in the mortar.

The length of crossbeam in this case didn’t matter much to me, and so I rather eyeballed a length and said “okay”, hacked off a fair piece of ¼” dowel, drilled two little holes for insulators, and shoved it into the hole, having doused the shoved end with Plumber’s Goop.

Here’s the dilemma, the problem, the big deal: look at the fence in the background. It’s bad. It’s really, really bad. I’m going to have to replace that fence. But replacing the fence? That’s some money, there, bucko…some money maybe I don’t have lying around here.

And there’s that whupping big stump there, too. I’m really excited to move on the wiring, but can’t until I deal with those two issues. Maybe I can skip ‘em both until I come up with some sort of funding for such projects, and move forward with the railway in the Parisian Section. But the wiring really got me today…wiring like this is pretty permanent stuff. In order to replace that fence I’d have to step through the wires like Godzilla…Dadzilla!…and the potential for damage is pretty huge.

Drat!

For Halloween this year we bought a couple of cheapo plastic skeletons from Big!Lots…our plan was to set ‘em up in front yard like they were having tea (we have a seven year old little girl, so bloody corpses are officially off the Halloween list).  To light them we used these very cool little LED light pucks…three bucks each! The pucks worked great, except that they were puck-shaped, not spotlight-shaped. It turned out an empty Diet-Pepsi can fit perfectly around the puck once we cut the ends off. Now they looked like spotlights…but how to mount ‘em out in the yard? I looked around the garage and spotted these nice ¼” by four foot long dowels. A little loop of nylon wire tie fished through the back of the puck led through a little hole drilled in the dowel…dude – adjustable, stakeable battery powered spotlights!

My wife cleaned up the yard and tossed the spotlight/stick units on my workbench.  I put torn shirts and stuff on her sewing table, she puts bits and pieces of stuff I leave around the house on my workbench.  I came to work on the my bridge but was barred from the bench from all these stupid sticks. What did I buy them for in the first place?  Oh yeah, power poles!

If you cut a 48” dowel into three equal pieces, you get three 16” lengths, which works as 24’ scale poles in 1/18th scale.  I figured what the hey, that seems like a good height for a power pole! I cut my 1/4×1/4 inch strip wood into 3 inch lengths to make the crossbeams.

Last time I attempted this little project I carved a nice curved little divot in the back of the crossbeam to accommodate the pole. As you can see the picture, it didn’t work so good; rather dumb to fight gravity with Plumber’s Goop and a nail. Instead I carved a ¼” notched into the pole to hold the crossbeam. Now the pole holds the crossbeam nice and firm, and the Plumber’s Goop and nail combo just makes sure it stays in place. I know, I know, brilliant. I used the Simul-Dremel to do the carving, and it came out pretty nice!

My daughter has this very nice little X-acto pencil sharpener mounted to her desk. It works great on making a killer point on the end of the pole…if you don’t tell her I used it for that, I certainly won’t.

I jabbed the pointy end of the poles into an empty cardboard box and blasted ‘em with black Rust-Oleum to seal out the weather. Then I oversprayed them with brown Rust-Oleum to make them look more wood-like.  Unfortunately, stuck in a box like that, with just that simple crossbar, the picture below looks to me like a scale model of Gethsemane.

My daughter’s  Make-A-Bracelet set supplied a reasonably fine wire to attach wee little beads to simulate the insulators. The wire holds the beads down, and a drop of Crazy-Glue Gel makes sure they stay there. I like the semi-translucent blue plastic of the insulators…looks to me like glass.

There’s an adage about using the right tool for the right job…I’ll have to study up on that one. Way down there at the end of the Ukrainian Station platform there’s a nifty place for a power pole. The biggest drill bit I own that’s smaller than an inch is 3/16”. I drilled a sweet little 3/16” hole to accommodate a ¼” dowel. Oops.  No problem, I’ll just gently drive the dowel into the hole with a few gentle taps with this hammer here. This 4lb Engineer’s hammer. BAM!!!! Well, now the dowel’s in there nice and tight. Unfortunately, I rather cracked it at the mitered crossbeam joint. Not meant to withstand that kind of a whuppin’, doncha know.

So now we have an effective, efficient and cool-looking power pole design. I stuck the other three prototypes between the tracks in the Parisian Turnout. I am surprised each time I walk past at how inhabited the place looks. Just a simple detail brings a ton of life to this forlorn section of the railway!

Wires? That’s this weekend. Once I have the wire, I’ll be able to figure out how far to space the poles to get a realistic drape on the wires…is that drape or droop? Anyway, wire’s a’comin’ this weekend!

You see, the headline’s supposed to be a pun about missing teeth…you, know, bridgework? Get It? No? Skip it.

As you know, we’ve abandoned nasty, scary plywood with spider egg sacs for clean, white, efficient Styrofoam.  Last week it was an idea, and this week, zoom, zip, kabam, it’s a bridge!

There’s an interesting life lesson here. Garden railroading, as you know, is real railroading, which means the lessons one learns in garden railroading must apply to real life. Rather “I am therefore I think” logic, but it gets the job done.

I’ve been putting this bridge project off forever because I don’t know anything about working seriously with Styrofoam.  Like everyone else I’ve hacked at it and swept up those little white pills that cling so statically to just about everything…won’t even dump out of the dustpan because they’re so electrically charged they can’t let go. But I have this glowing memory of my stepson in the 4th grade…here in California our 4th graders learn about the California Missions, and are required to build a model of one. It’s  a big business for Michael’s…the craft store sells Styrofoam kits of each of the missions, complete with little fountains and stuff like that. We took my stepson’s kit from Michaels and coated it with this interesting yellowish slurry of “heavy” acrylic…acrylic paint from the bottom of the bottle that hasn’t been mixed. The result looked very much like stucco.  But that’s not the point of the story.

The point of the story is this; Walt Disney said the difference between someone who dreams and someone who lives their dreams is that the person who lives their dreams actually does it. Or maybe it was if you want to do something, do it. Now I don’t remember what it was. Dang. It was a good one. I fall for those jingo-istic things all the time. There’s no I in teamwork…I get it! But that’s not the point of the story either.

The point of the story is this; yesterday I didn’t have a bridge because all I had to work with was crappy old plywood and outdated tools. By shifting my paradigm and looking at the situation from a different standpoint, today I have a nifty bridge that is pretty near complete.  It took a shift in attitude, but I did it.  Like Captain Kirk and Kobiyashi Maru…if you didn’t see that Star Trek movie, you are forgiven.  The underlying theme of the film is that there is always a third alternative, even if you have to manufacture it. The Kobiyashi Maru was a Star Fleet Academy simulation of a rescue mission…the people taking the simulation did not know that they were destined to fail it because it actually designed to test their response to failing in a critical situation. Captain Kirk was the only guy to make it through the simulation and succeed. He knew he was supposed to pass it and that no one else did, so he hacked the computer system and rigged it so he would succeed. He created a different alternative.

So, when you look at those big wonderful things you’ve always wanted to do, ask yourself this: why aren’t you doing them?  I know you have very valid reasons as to why you’re not, just like the rest of us. But, how can you engineer your circumstances to make it possible? What can you hack, what can you quit, what can you start that will get you moving towards your dream? If you look at it not by saying what can’t be done, but by saying what can, you’ll be amazed at what follows. Trust me.

Proof? I have a nifty bridge down there in my China Section. Is it perfect? Heck no! I have a rough slurry of heavy acrylic paint on the north side, a plaster of Paris roadbed down the center, and a combination of plaster of Paris and slurry coating the south side. But look at it again; yesterday I didn’t have a bridge, today I do.

What changed? I finally got off my duff, faced my fears about the Styrofoam, and built the darned bridge! I expected the project to take months…in reality I was just afraid to commit to doing it.

That is really the point of this whole railway project: I used to be afraid of building my garden railway, because it seemed so big and I know so little.  But we’ve broken it down into little chunks, you and me,  and we’re working those chunks! They’re not so big! We can do it! You can do it!

The bridge is rough, but it looks pretty good. Once my various coatings are dry, I’ll nail it with good old Rust-Oleum and then paint it in earnest. I’m happy with the outline, and I like the arched deck  – that took a lot of quick thinking, but it worked out great.

It’s supposed to rain here in the next couple of days…I’m interested to see what effect the rain will have on my acrylic slurry.  I know it won’ t hurt the Styrofoam…at least I hope not!

I apologize for waxing philosophic, but I have a lot about which to be philosophical these days. Someday I’ll buy you a beer and we’ll sort it all out.
For now, though, let’s just put it this way: the difference between my bridge of yesterday and my bridge of today is that I went and did something about it.  Hint hint hint!

“What’s this?” says the CEO. “Styrofoam?  Isn’t that…well…cheap?”

“We prefer to say it’s economical,” replies the PR Guy.  “We also prefer to use the phrase ‘architectural foam’ in exchange for the banal Styrofoam.

“Banal,” says the Chief Engineer. “Don’t that mean bathroom?”

Well, there you go, sunk to bathroom humor within the first fifty words…it’s got to be a record!

As you may have heard, we abandoned nasty, splintery, naily old plywood in favor of light, smooth, easy to use Styrofoam. Yes, Styrofoam, the king of take-out food materials, has proven itself to be right at home on the garden railway.

Like most wonder materials, however, Styrofoam has some interesting quirks that take a little getting used to. For one thing, it’s messy. For another, it ain’t natural, folks, so be prepared to leave the green road. But once you get the hang of it you are in for an interesting treat.

I think I bought the wrong Styrofoam for my project.  I’ve read where other modelers have used architectural foam to great success. Theirs, however, is that dense cell blue stuff. I went to Lowe’s and bought a couple of sheets of what looked like architectural foam to me…4×8 sheets of white foam. When I got it home, though, I realized it’s just plain old Styrofoam , the kind your Chinese food comes home in, sandwiched between two thin plastic sheets. I was gravely disappointed, until I started working with it. Trust me, you’ll like it.

Cutting this laminate Styrofoam is easy, and no special tools are required.   If you’ve ever tried to cut plain old Styrofoam (like the kind that they packed around your new 8-Track player) with a knife, you know you’ll get Snowfall Over the Alleghenies; white pepper-corn dandruff that goes everywhere.   Expecting the worst, I used the quasi-sharp knife blade in my trusty Leatherman tool. Because of that plastic sheet laminate, this stuff cuts smoothly and retains a reasonably clean edge…you can cut freehand curves and everything!

But here’s the thing: you gotta cut this stuff like a man. Don’t treat it like styrene, you know, where you make a shallow cut and then go back over it. Doing that here breaks through the laminate and exposes the white dandruff. Go straight at this stuff. Drive your knife all the way through both sides and cut it with a gentle sawing motion. You’ll find that it cuts like a dream.

You can make it curve, like inside the arch of my railroad bridge, by cutting through the Styrofoam from one side all the way down to the laminate on the other side. I cut through the laminate on one side and about halfway through the foam itself. Making sure to leave the laminate on the other side intact, I broke the Styrofoam along my cut lines. The uncut laminate acts kind of like a hinge and allows you to build remarkably smooth curvy things.

The ancient tool, fire, can be used to anneal the edges of my Styrofoam pieces. A candle did a nice job of slightly melting the edges, closing gaps between the large cells of the foam and making ‘em stick together.

Now, sticking is an issue. My current favorite adhesive is Plumber’s Goop. It works great and holds super strong to the laminate sheet. But it is unbelievably aggressive towards the unprotected Styrofoam.  As the foam is naturally anhydrous…

“How can Styrofoam be ‘naturally’ anything?” mutters the Chief Engineer.

“Shush,” says the CEO as he lights a cigar. “Let’s just go with it.”

…and is extremely reactive to toluene-based adhesives, your choices are kind of limited. I cheated, and you might want to as well. I used dopey old Elmer’s Glue, knowing that it’ll work like a stick-um, and then screwed the pieces of my bridge together with gnarly 3 inch long deck screws. The thing is sturdy!

Oil-based paints, too, will attack the Styrofoam itself, although I’m rather certain they’ll stick just fine to the laminated sides. Water-based paints won’t stick, and oil-based paints will attack. What to do?  Well, again, I cheated. I used straight water-based acrylics, but I didn’t mix ‘em first. I used the colored sludge at the bottom of the bottles. And I didn’t brush it on: I stippled it on. The thickness that comes from stippling the super-heavy paint makes it work kind of like a glue. All I’m trying to do with my acrylics is get a coating over the bare Styrofoam so that I can use enamels on it…my thinking is that the acrylics will protect the Styrofoam while the enamels protect the acrylics. I’ll let you know what happens.

Here’s the beauty of the Styrofoam: it cuts easily, holds its shape, and forgives your sloppy workmanship. You don’t need a scary power tool to cut it, and mega-projects like this bridge go together in the blink of an eye!

If you’ve been following along, you may remember that we built a bridge in China…well, not in China, the real China, but in the China Section of the Paris to Peking Railway.

I had cut the thing out of nasty old plywood I rescued from the detritus generated by the removal of the roof over my patio.

There’s kind of a funny story that goes along with this bridge and that detritus: my wife and I were both unemployed at the time, but had agreed to marshal some of our meager funds together to splurge on a dumpster for the detritus from the roof.  We could only afford one dump of the dumpster. While I was up there tearing down this monstrous roofing project of something like 12×30 feet of double thick plywood covered with tarpaper and four hundred thousand nails, my wife was cutting back the foliage on the trees around the house.  It was mid spring and hotter than the bloody blue blazes and the plywood was super heavy and really nailed down in so many places I used a circular saw to cut it into little pieces rather than waste time fighting all that steel.  My wife expended similar energy on her pruning project – so much so that when the dumpster came there were huge piles of chopped down greenery surrounding the house. As the piles of pruning were obvious to the neighbors and passers-by and actually extended onto the sidewalk in several places, and as I had been  very careful to keep the junk from the roof in our own backyard, just take a guess which project utilized our only pass at the dumpster. Go ahead and guess – I’ll wait. I still, to this very day, have massive stacks of quasi-chopped up plywood in my backyard!

Late this summer my wife announced we could afford another run at the dumpster concept…she’s tired, you see, of stepping around the vast pile of naily, scary, tarpapery plywood chunks and the seven and half million black widows living under it.

Under the threat of impending dumpsterdom it suddenly became imperative to use up as much of that plywood as I could salvage before the dumpster arrived. That was two months ago.  No dumpster yet.

Anyway, that’s the story behind the crummy plywood used in the China Section Bridge.  When  I made the first measurements for the bridge, I figured 18 inches is plenty of height  for the center of bridge…six inches of span above a portal that was a foot high. When I set the completed structure on the railway, however, it looked absolutely absurd.  What was I thinking? How tall are these trains?

Today I used the Hitachi circular saw to drop the bridge by about four inches. As you can see, it looks much better, although height continues to be an issue. I’m afraid the problem is in that six inches above the portal…at two feet to the inch, that’s a twelve foot tall cross section on the bridge. Why would you build a bridge that massive for a road over the railway?

This is half-inch plywood – nice and stiff, and durable as the day is long. And as much of a pain in the keester to cut as anything! I’m looking at that schwoopie top edge of the bridge….THAT’s what  I have to re-cut, moving it down to just three inches above the top of the portal. The only power tool I have to do that is my father-in-law’s really scary jigsaw, and it doesn’t like that material.

Here’s what I’m thinking. I may be wrong, correct me if I’m right. This bridge carries no weight – it’s just for show. Why, for heaven’s sake, do I have to continue working with this nasty plywood? What if I decided to donate the plywood to the Dumpster Gods and instead carved the bridge out of foam? It doesn’t rot if you coat it with a good heavy paint, it’s lightweight and easy to cut, and DANG if that isn’t what we’ll do!

Thanks for working with me on this.  I knew I could rely on your insight to help me figure this out.

FOAM! The miracle material! Maybe it’ll replace popsicle sticks and plywood altogether!

Nawp, maybe not.