Fences

Building our model railway is about experimenting and learning. We've gone for a mixture of building styles and types with different finishes, as indeed you would find in any town with a bit of history to it.

The same can be said of fences. It would be rather flat and boring to have the same sort of fence all over the layout. So far we have three types of fence. Two have been 3D printed and one is completely handmade. One of the 3D printed fences runs along the side of the track one the east side of the layout. You can see some of it in this photograph:

The ,layout is more developed now and this fence encloses the green area. It even has a couple of gates in it for access.

The handmade fence is constructed from matchsticks and floristry wire. It's all high tech stuff here! The matchsticks need to have 1mm holes drilled through them to take the wire that is painstakingly threaded through. 3mm holes drilled in the base board at 25mm centres locate the sticks. I'll add a dab of PVA later to secure them, but they are a reasonably snug fit, so nu rush.

I've tried a couple of ways to weather them. A mixture of a burnt umber acrylic wash and the more recent batch that are currently drying have been dipped in a wood stain.

To drill the holes I lined up a whole bunch of matchsticks on a piece of double-sided tape in a small jig made from off-cuts of ply. Then a steady hand with a hand-drill and taking my time I made the holes. Some of the matchstick split, but that was okay because they could still be used and they gave the fence a more aged looked with little bits broken away.

The matchsticks I used came without the live end. you buy them for modelling purposes this way in a big bag of about 1000.