East Norwood, OH in Z Scale

[Jesse6669]

Adventures in 1:220 limestone gravel..

I mixed up a batch of sanded grout with grays and a little brown and applied it.  To the naked eye it looks ok.  To the camera, it looks more lumpy and not consolidated, and also shows "crystals", ie the facets on the sand. 



I thought about what makes the real limestone crushed rock pack down better--more fines.  Gray weathering pigment is fine.. so I went over the whole area with a dose of gray pigment and rubbed it in a bit.  This yields a good look, I think.  It fills in space in the rock like fines, and also tones down the sparkles. 

I added some scenic cement to a section to see what it did, and sprayed the other half with matte clear--both darkened the pigments.  The section with pigment alone looks best and is permanent enough (I'll see how it looks after the cement and clear has fully dried);  In any case, I tested the pigment alone section with a vacuum and it stayed in place.

[robert3985]

If you're particular about how your ballast looks, both texture and color, from hard experience, I would make sure I ballasted a small test piece of track before settling on either a texture or color.

In my experience on customer's layouts/modules ofttimes the dry color/texture doesn't even come close to what the ballast looks like after it's been glued down and allowed to dry using the normal soaking with ballast glue method.

Also, the shiny rock surfaces will be less if your adhesive you mix with water is matte.  I find that Mod-Podge Matte works very well without gloss (like white glue) and without white deposits (like artist's Matte Medium sometimes does).

Cheerio!
Bob Gilmore

[Chris333]

Back in my Z scale days  :trollface

I bought a micron filter screen to sift ballast to about 2 z scale inches.