Thanks Mark!
Well I hope all of you survived the holiday. This was the first TG in quite a few years that both kids and all the grandkids were not here.
Well the bullet has been bitten! I'm actually putting the "fence" part onto the chain link fence. I started out by spraying a very light coat of Tamiya gray primer. I did this in the basement and proceeded to smell the whole house up since the work space where I was working is next to the heater and it pulled the fumes into the system. Didn't make CEO very happy. I opened some windows in the basement to pull in the some fresh air.
I was working on the sawing bench I have in the shop adjacent to the layout. It was badly lit since the nearest florescent is over the railroad behind me and I was working in my shadow. I just bought another LED shop light at Costco to replace a light in the shop. I'm slowly going to replace all the fluorescents with LED fixtures. They put out more, purer light at half the wattage. I then installed this now-spare fixture over the work table to make my life much easier.
The next thing was to cut the Bridal Tulle to the approximate width of the fence to which it will be glued. I measured the distance and marked the tulle every foot or so with a Sharpie. I then taped it to a cutting board and with a new #11 blade and 18" straight edge, cut the material. It will take three 3' strips to do the entire fence.
I added the dotted line to the pic to highlight where the Sharpie marks are.
I first thought to just use CA to hold the tulle to the frame, but it wasn't working well. I just bought some "fresh" thin CA, but I don't believe it's any good. It wasn't kicking even with accelerator. I'm taking it back. So I turned to the MicroMark PSA. It isn't great since the surface area on the tulle is so small there's just not enough to really stick to the sticky adhesive. But it holds it well enough to then go back and spot glue with CA. I went back to my aging CA. It's getting thicker, but it still kicks and holds.
Any fuzzy areas at the bottom are trimmed with a sharp blade while holding the tulle with a tweezers.
I made pretty good progress today even with a protracted work session. I just have about a foot and a half to finish the tulle and I'll be ready to install it. The bare space you're looking at is land reserved for the future engine house and machine shop. Probably scheduled to be built mid-to-late 2018.
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You can get an idea just how unwieldy this construction is. It's over 10 feet long with lots of bends.
After all the tulle is in tomorrow I'm going airbrush the whole deal some kind of simulated galvanized steel color. I may just shoot it with flat aluminum. I'll see how it looks. For the substation, I actually mixed up some gray and aluminum to give kind of a metallic gray. It worked pretty well. Maybe I'll do that again. It's alcohol-based so it doesn't smell up the place too bad.
I'm thinking that I may not need to insert ALL of those posts into the layout. I may clip every other one to streamline the insertion process. The other thought I had was to leave every 5th post long, and the then cut those next to them shorter and the middle one shorter still. This would facilitate getting the posts into the holes because you wouldn't be trying to get all of those long ones into holes at the same time.
