Up the Creek Column - 10
17. Liquid Nails for projects cleans up with water, has
no nasty solvent vapor outgassing, and gives me up to
15 minutes to get the layers clamped. I was amazed
at how much adhesive it took for each 4x8 sheet – at
least two tubes. The trowel has 3/32” notched edges.
16. The first backdrop sheet wedged and clamped in
place. The need to clear the conduit and beam made this
piece a huge pain to install. Plus, we had to shove hard
to get it to flex into the 24” radius curve.
A day after getting the first piece of backdrop in place, I returned
to Lowes and picked up another 16 sheets – enough to finish the
backdrop. At $15.50 a sheet it was spendier than I wanted, but I
was happy to have a backdrop solution at hand. This stuff came
with one side primed and the other with a nice natural wood
grain. The scraps will work great for building control panels, car
card boxes and other things like that.
Laminating the layers
With the supply of 5mm plywood I also bought four tubes of
Liquid Nails (water cleanup and no toxic outgassing). It was time to
start spreading glue and laminating the second layer.
I used flat head deck screws to attach the first layer to the ceiling
cleats and the roadbed edge below [18]. The plan was to laminate
the second layer right over the screw heads – a risky proposition
because once it was glued together, there was no way to get it
apart again without a lot of destruction.
Another train buddy, Jim, helped cut a 3’ piece of plywood to start
the second layer, ensuring the end-of-sheet joints in the layers
wouldn’t line up with each other. I squeezed out what I thought
was a generous amount of construction adhesive on the first layer
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MRH-Jul 2014
