Plaster of Paris

I begun my second day of work attempting to glue the polystyrene pieces down. Apparently PVA doesn't work, and the craft glue I used destroys the polystyrene, but I got enough to vaguely hold things in place which is all that was required. I also used some nails for the bottom level to stop it drifting.

Mixing plaster is new for me, and it wasn't too hard to get the consistency. The issues were with the quick setting, messy and hard to shape material. Eventually I managed to work out how to get it down and things sped up a little. Shortly before I got to the point I wanted to be I ran out of plaster, so things got delayed further by shopping trip.

After waiting for the plastic to (kinda) set I experimented with a few ways to smooth out the bumps and holes, which were far worse than I was hoping. Sand paper was quickly destroyed by the plaster and a file didn't achieve a lot. I used a rasp to do a significant part of the job, but it was slow progress as I constantly had to clean out the rasp.

As I was cleaning up my father came up and attacked the plaster with a chisel. The bad part was things were no longer clean, but the good part was I found a chisel does a very good job of shaping the plaster, so I spent some more time using this method.


For reference here is the track next to a 50c piece.