Some finishing type work. - Vol 1

Well, I am getting tired of looking at wires hanging down on the higher sections of the layout. So, since I have finished the wiring of Reed, I decided to begin hanging some 1/8 inch Masonite to cover the view and allow the start of some scenery work. This is how it looks at the start. The control panel for Reed is built and hung.

Then we come through the curve leading to Crowl. I purchase a large order of Masonite and had my son in laws and Justin help me cut quite a few sheets to size over Christmas for me to work with. Then I coated the back with a shellac type sealer to prevent movement.  

 I thought it would be an easy issue of just putting up the masonite but Ed Rappe, Paul Cieurzo and Jack Brown quickly disabused me of that notion on a Monday night when I was hosting our weekly meeting. There is a lot of substructure I have to place to make it strong enough to resist people pressing against it. That includes wood backs at seams as well.

 Here we are temporarily setting  a piece to locate the wood seam backer. You can see the white from the sealer on the rear of the sheet. We also leveled the sheet on the bottom to make sure it met the panel without a big gap.

 This shows that we placed some reinforcers behind the sheet leading to the roadbed to hold it out off the scenery when it is covered.

Here it is where it meets the panel. Things look good so I can go ahead and place it using some Liquid Nails adhesive. I plan to use that primarily to minimize the spackling I have to do to hid any holes. This took quite a lot of time to start.