What is the best medium to represent sand in HO scale? Real sand just looks to large for me. Any Ideas? Presston
I haven't tried it yet, but some of my wife's makeup called base powder sure does look close. I'm gonna give her a bag of sand next time she goes shopping and have her find a shade that looks closest.
Preston, Welcome to the TrainBoard. Glad to have you on board! Unfortunately, I can't answer your question about sand directly. However, I have read where you can take some sand, grind it between two flat rocks or anything flat and hard. Then sift it through a very fine strainer to seperate out the "dust" which you can use for model sand. Never tried it myself, but it sounds good ... ? Ever try typing with a kitten walking on the keyboard ... it's tough, lemme tell you! 0000000000wftdtr;kljnmjk,ssd (that was her signature )
Well, prototype sand varies in coarseness and colour quite a bit, but I would think almost any type would scale down to something like matt paint finish in HO . Is this for a static pile, beach, etc. or are you going to be pouring it back and forth as wagon loads or suchlike? (though that would likely be the death of some of your mechanisms!!) For a static mass I would think a smooth filler would do the job. It is more important to get the 'look' of the whole thing with shape and colour than to replicate the individual grain structure. Funnily enough I was looking at an exhibition layout yesterday which had some extensive coastal sand dunes and a beach - it looked very, very realistic, but I never looked hard to see how it was made up. The sea was based on white filler (they had a demo section of how the water was done) so I suspect the same was used for the beach and dunes.
