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Hello everyone,

Like many of us, I enjoy setting up a Christmas layout near my tree, using ceramic and porcelain structures and scenery.  My big annoyance has always been that my trees won't stay upright on the polyester batting "snow" I use, especially with 3 cats in the house.  It occurred to me to cover the entire top of the layout with sheet metal and glue powerful magnets to the bottoms of the trees.  Now  I can place the trees anywhere I like, and they stay put.  If a cat knocks one over, I simply set it upright again.  The images will help show how I made this work.

This layout is small, only 4' x 4', to make it easy to set up and take down.  It goes without saying that the sheet metal had to be magnetic, which pointed me to galvanized steel.  I searched online for either one 4' x 4' sheet or two 2' x 4' sheets, but I found the cost to be prohibitive.  So I went to the home center and bought four six-inch duct sections, 2 feet long.  These came "unassembled", i.e., flat.   I used tin snips to cut the sections to fit my plywood, and cleaned the metal surfaces thoroughly with denatured alcohol.  Then I used Loctite Quick Grab adhesive to fasten the metal to the plywood.  If I had it to do over, I would use 3M Super 90 spray adhesive.  Because I have four lighted buildings for this layout, I drilled four holes through the sheet metal and plywood so the light cords can pass through.

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Next I filled the seams between the sheet metal sections with drywall compound, and when that was dry I rolled on two coats of acrylic-based white primer that's suitable for metal.  I found that the primer doesn't stick really well to the metal, but the paint is protected by the snow cover.

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To attach the polyester batting "snow" I used the hook part of self-adhesive hook-and-loop fastener strips on the underside edges of the plywood.  The strips grab the batting and hold it in place well enough that I can stretch the batting tightly across the top.

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On the bottoms of the trees I used neodymium magnets that I also bought at the home center.  They measure 1/2" diameter, although they look huge in the close-up image.  I ground away a bit of the base of each tree so that the magnets would be recessed a little.  I attached the magnets with cyanoacrylate glue.  The wire tree "trunks" prevented me from recessing the magnets flush with the bottoms of the bases, but I think the magnets grab better this way.

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I would have had to drill much larger holes in the tabletop to use the supplied 120-volt light cords, so I decided to use Dept. 56 low voltage lighting.  The 3-volt bulbs put out much less light than the 120-volt bulbs, so I don't use the provided power supply.  Instead I drive the power strip and bulbs from the 5-volt terminals of my vintage Lionel 1033 transformer.  I know this overdrives the bulbs but they were pretty dim to start with, and I haven't had any issues with premature bulb failure.  The power strip has a female coax connector that I glued into in one of the layout's side rails so that I can easily connect to it.  I cut the male cord off of the original power supply, keeping the male plug and about a foot of the cord, and attached spade lugs to that for my 1033, which sits on the corner of the layout that's closest to the connector.  The light cords pass through the layout and plug into any of the jacks in the power strip.  This part of the set-up and take-down can be done in a matter of seconds.

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At this time I don't have an image of the entire layout, but we set it up the day after Thanksgiving, so I'll post an image or two of the whole thing then.

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OGR Publishing, Inc., 1310 Eastside Centre Ct, Suite 6, Mountain Home, AR 72653
800-980-OGRR (6477)
www.ogaugerr.com

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