Almost a Doona Day

With the overnight temperature dropping way low, the doona came out last night and replaced the blankets on the bed - so much lighter yet warmer and soooo easy to sleep under. So when the alarm went off, three times I hit that snooze alarm - almost never made it out of bed!

So with my coffee drunk and the news read, it was off to the club for some hobbying. I managed today to get the cork down and painted for the two tracks for the Cement Silos. The track will be able to be glued down on Saturday I reckon.

I then spent some time working out what might suit the area to the left of the Cement Silos. I came up with a number of possibilities, but settled on perhaps these. Maybe we can put the Walthers Imperial Foods building on the first siding ( https://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-2852) and maybe the Walthers Centennial Mills building at the back, it being a low relief type structure as well (http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-3160). I have cut out a white template and pegged it in place for people to look at to see if it suits.

Next bit of work was to do some more gap filling, this time on the road coming down the hill towards the Cement Silos. The mix was no more gaps, water, a pile of foam beads and only some sawdust, and of course some paint.

And just on lunch time I got a half a caulking tube of no more gaps and paint mix down on the back part of the hill to coat a bit of the raw foam.

Now time always tells. So today after some of my gap filler mixes had had quite a while to dry, I found some drawbacks to one component - the sawdust. The mixes with the highest proportion of sawdust in them had shrinkage where a large amount of the "putty" was used. The photo below shows a large amount of the putty being used to fill the side of the track area - it would be about 3/4 of an inch thick and was as much sawdust as could fit in the mix and no foam beads for bulking.

Small amounts of the putty used, caused little to no problem. Also if there were a bit of foam beads to add structural support and bulk, thereby reducing the actual percentage of sawdust in the mix, the cracks were very small indeed.

Compare the above photos to a mix that was almost purely foam beads and no more gaps - no discernible cracks at all.

But really, the cracks are easily fixed by using a small amount of the same mix of no more gaps and sawdust. It would appear that large volumes of the mix drying are the real problem. So I'll do some patching next week and no one will be the wiser... will they?

The advantages of using sawdust to get a nice smooth finish really outweighs the little bit of work a few days later in filling cracks.