Ok fellas, slow down, I'll make you some more.
The N scalers down at the club are going hammer and tongs on the layout and are running out of dirt and gravels. So they put in a request for a pile of dirt. OK, I says - I'll getcha some.
So yesterday I headed off to one of my gravel sources up towards Lake Samsonvale. It is an outcropping of shale that spills down onto the concrete footpath, so I figure no harm in a few shovel fulls to keep it off of the footpath - save the tax payers I reckon. So I brought along a kitchen sieve that has about 3.125 mm square holes in it, a couple of buckets and a small gardening spade.
I sieved each shovel full there, as there was no use in bringing any big stuff back as it was not wanted.
Once home I got out the real set of sieves I had gotten from a Geology store somewhere a number of years back. They are all 8" in diameter and fit snuggly into each other so they can stack. So I had 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.71, 0.9, 1.0 and 1.25 mm sieves to play with for this lot.
I stacked them in two towers, as one tower was too hard to handle.
So with the larger size at the top and the smaller at the bottom, cup full after cup full of material went through the sieves and was slowly sorted into piles.
Once sieved, the < 0.4 mm material "dirt" was packaged up into chinese food containers and labeled. All the rest was seperately washed out in the yard, to get all the dirt, dust and organic material out of the gravels. It also happily watered my very dry lawn, as I made sure to keep moving around the yard whilst doing the washing up.
Once washed, I poured the gravels onto some baking trays and spread it out evenly and set them in the oven at an even 200 degrees celcius. Oh get out of it - the sun was out, so I didn't have to use the oven this time...
With the trays sitting on the dirt between my clothes drying shed and the house in the baking hot sun, I went over every 10 minutes or so and racked the gravels over so each grain could evenly cook, I mean dry.
Once dry, I packaged and labeled it all up. So out of about 10 or 11 litres of original material, I ended up with 16 of these 650 ml chinese containers of various sized gravels and dirt. Should keep the boys happy for a bit I think.
So they'll have the dirt for dirt roads, and yards and such. Then there are the various fine grades of gravel to suit some roads and such and then there is ballast size gravel as well. Also some ballast gravel for the HO'ers so they don't feel left out. So this shot shows how many containers of each I ended up with.
Oh and at the end of it all, my clothes and myself were covered in dust from head to toe. I had made sure earlier on to close the house doors and windows to make sure it didn't get inside. Because it was so sticking hot, the sweat and dust turned to mud on me and the clothes - but a good standing under the outside hose for a while fixed that in the end AND cooled me down :-)
