Another Approach to Ballasting

[PAL]

I've always avoided ballasting - putting all that  water, grit and glue  into intimate proximity to electrics and tiny mechanisms is  just asking for it, right? God knows, there's been plenty of agonised testimony to that on this forum over the years. And I have a  shunting layout,  all points and no long runs. I always thought there must be a better way. Admittedly there's the  always-inventive Chris Nevard's use of Das to create that ash-ballast look. However, a long time ago on this forum,  a member of this fraternity, 28XX by pseudonym,  mentioned that he uses  DIY ultra-fine filler for the same purpose (Goods Yard Ballast? 13/8/2015 - can't do hyperlinks). And as I recollect, no-one followed up his post.

28XX's post set me thinking. This stuff is acrylic. Finally I got some tubes of acrylic paint in the relevant colours from Hobbycraft (£2 for a big tube) and sieved some sharp sand (another Nevard favourite).  If you mix the filler with the sand, it's hopeless - it won't stick together, and the filler is brilliant white anyway (28XX, incidentally, said he painted his with emulsion of choice  - another acrylic, I believe - after it had dried). But if you begin to add  gobs of the paint to your favoured shade plus a little water a bit at a time, you eventually end up with something like a toothpaste consistency  - plastic enough to be controllable but not runny. I applied it to one of my short runs with a nice bendy sawn-off artist's palette knife, then used a stiff flat artist's brush on the sleepers and the sides of the rails. It was fingernail-hard in a couple of hours, and solid in six. I don't have a smart phone or a camera to supply a picture, but I venture to say the result looks pretty good to my eye. Adhesion to the cork underlay, which I thought might be a problem, is solid. No cracks in the stuff have yet appeared -  tho it's only been 24 hours. Before I move on to doing a point, the ultimate test, I'd be most grateful for members' comments. Has anyone else tried something similar? Most particularly, are you still out there, 28XX?

  

 

  

 

[ejstubbs]

28XX doesn't seem to have been around since October last year: https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/profile/5868-28xx/

 

The thread you were referring to is this one:

 

 

[spikey]

2 hours ago, PAL said:

... I don't have a smart phone or a camera to supply a picture, but I venture to say the result looks pretty good to my eye ...

 

Well if you're happy with it, surely that's all that matters?  In the absence of pictures of the end result, sorry but I don't really see how the rest of us can usefully comment.