Block by Block: Carving Terrain from XPS Foam

[Music] ah Saturday morning and here's Denny ready for a productive day on the layout foam blocks check Tools in order check a calm creative afternoon ahead but little does he know what dangers lurk in the [Music] smoke so I need to Contour this entire area with some land forms as I'm trying to go through the list of things I need to do next on the layout um I'm very interested in getting the fascia installed and to get all the wiring hidden and the individual um siding controls installed so this is where I need to focus my energy right now is to build out this fictional overpass and that will then Cascade into the rest of the scenic areas so it isn't well defined on my little maette that I built a few months ago um definitely I have the water feature opening up into the face of the layout I'm using a few cans of spray paint to try to figure out my sight lines so when you're standing Square to the layout um you can see the backdrop through that area there now you have to also take a look at what the view block is going to look like down the side of the layout here another detail that I just need to consider is that the bridge is supported on these Stone abutments and they will be buried into the hillside um as the speed square sort of indicates and so I need to make sure that I Contour the profile of the base of the Hill around this appropriately it just wouldn't stop flat it's going to come out down to an area like this so I'm mostly happy with the view block that I've designed here it's not perfect but it's going to work well for what I want so the contour lines for the shore line have been figured out and now I'm going to start building up the topography around it the approach I'm going to take to build up all of the land forms is very similar to working with let's say building blocks like Legos extruded foam is very expensive where I live so I don't want to waste a lot of money by doing the wedding cake or the layer cake style where you fill in complete areas with foam and continue to stack it um I instead want to do sort of a retaining wall where I break off pieces of foam every 3 or 4 in and step it back and glue it so that it's Hollow underneath but I create the topography using small chunks of foam they do have some offcuts from other layouts and I've simply taken the foam and run it through the band saw to create 3-in wide sections and I'll use those as my building blocks as I start to build out the topography um I'll cut them with a utility knife and put them in place so I know a lot of people that use either wood glue or white glue to put their foam together it's not super strong but it works okay the most ideal adhesive for this job would be something called pl300 so some research has indicated that I can use weld Bond it is listed as an adhesive for styrofoam it is clean um non-toxic and it dries fairly quickly this is a clean and tidy method for me to put the foam together it'll be my first time ever using this and so we'll see how it goes [Music] this is one day's work um I got to spend a rainy afternoon down here and just kept cutting individual bricks um putting down a bit of weld Bond and just moving along and stacking and contouring and right now I think think the result is excellent I'm very very happy with how these things are progressing you can see that from the front it's difficult to see where the river meets the backdrop same thing over here it disappears into the backdrop and from this angle you can barely make out the tunnel portal so the curvature of this River or stream um has worked out the way that I want it as an adhesive the weld Bond seems to be working excellent um I did give this overnight chance to cure and so today everything feels Rock Solid and I didn't use a huge amount of glue I spread it on fairly thinly with a paintbrush but everything is very well secured I'm also building up the front of the layout where the fascia is going to be installed um I don't need to fill in this area I just need to have the top area and I think the fascia will stick well against um the foam blocks as well as the wooden joists um for this I will use some pl300 but I figure I can put the face sh along little bit of pl300 and a screw into there and that should be Rock Solid okay so over the last couple nights I've been able to build up the land forms here um using that sort of Minecraft approach of stacking little blocks sort of like building a pyramid and I think it's turned out really well I have a rough idea of where the landforms are and I'm actually really happy with how things have progressed so before I move any further around the layout I want to get to the next part which is actually shaping these Hills um they're pretty rough they're obviously blocky and now I need to smooth them down and one of the things I want to use for that is a very inexpensive hot wire cutter that I picked up online I think this cost me about $10 it wasn't very pricey and I suspect it's also not very good but uh we'll give it a try and with that I had said origin how I had selected weld bond to glue this all together and first of all that worked out really well um everything here is absolutely Rock Solid it's set up in 24 hours it's indestructible um I had mentioned I wanted easy cleanup so on and so forth I didn't want to use a cocking gun the other thing is is that I have used different hot wire cutters in the past um to shape foam and anytime I've ever used something like pl300 it forms a pretty thick layer of adhesive and when you're trying to use one of these hot wire cutters it runs into that adhesive and it really struggles to cut through it so using the weld Bond and brushing it on pretty thinly was my solution so that while this is trying to make its way through the foam um when it runs into the adhesive it doesn't get hung up on it I've been experimenting a little bit with this uh hot wire cutter and admittedly it's not very powerful um and this is a fairly thick amount of foam place like this where it's all stacked um I can take the hot wire cutter and I can lean it into the foam until I get far enough back that I cut through all the layers like so so that it knocks off all of the high spots so I'm also just going to try to move this along and see if I can actually cut out the Contours actually that wasn't too bad so here is just a few minutes of carving done with the hot wire cutter and uh I'm actually really happy with this um it's obviously rough I'll take a rasp and maybe some sandpaper to it and smooth it up but already I can start to see how this Valley is shaping up and it's actually really exciting this has gone very quickly to get to this state um so I'm really happy with the farthest corner back there is exactly 4 ft from the edge of the table I made that completely removable so be able to lift it off and put it on the workbench I did not however make that Hill removable so I'm basically going to need to lay across the table in order to carve that up and it probably goes without saying that you need to be safe when you're doing this sort of work um I'm certainly guilty many times of just jumping in and doing stuff cutting foam and the fumes that come off of that are not good for you I really do recommend you get yourself a mask uh this has got a 3M 60001 filter on it this is really all you're going to need in order to keep yourself well cuz you will get nauseous off of these fumes and it will give you a terrible headache and let's face it they're not good for you when shaping your landscape from expanded polystyrene it may seem like innocent fun but hidden within the cheerful white foam I danger yes EPS foam when cut with heat releases fumes not just any fumes but the kind that tickle the lungs in all the wrong ways that's why today's responsible modeler uses proper protection the 3M reusable respirator fitted with 601 organic Vapor cartridges trusted by hobbyists graffiti artists and lone Wanderers alike remember just because it's foam doesn't mean it's friendly you're probably looking at about $50 now to get one of these complete um the piece of advice I would give you that you'll get anywhere that you look is that these filters are always working which means that when they're sitting out they're still filtering so in between uses take them off the mask put them in a Ziploc bag and store them to extend their life um and ultimately once they're opened they do expire if you do get to try one of these and you're cutting foam you will notice immediately that you're not getting the fumes and you're not getting that instantaneous headache so uh yeah be safe so from the east side of the layout all the way over here to the West End of the layout um all of the styrofoam has been installed and mostly shaped I'm leaving a few sections um for when the fascia gets installed so I can figure out the Contours but everywhere else is basically done so something that I would have done a little differently and I'm going to try to fix now is that if you take a look at this hill right here um I glued it to the tabletop and so the trouble is I can't pull it back from the wall to carve it near near to the top of the wall so it's difficult for me to get um the slope that I want to built into it if you take a look over here that scenery block I made removable and I was able to carve that on the workbench and I like the way it turned out a little bit better so I'm going to make a change to my hot wire cutter so that I can shape that Hill um a little more to my liking okay so there is the cutter before and here is the cutter after uh I bent it at almost a 45 degree angle um what I'm hoping is then that I can get up beside the wall uh and change the cut we'll see if I wrecked it still works I don't know if you can see it smoking here but it's hot as ever um I doubt I would have a lot of luck bending this back to its original um probably I would break that joint but I've customized it to what I think I need um it's flaming hot and it was only $10 so I'm going to to continue trying to finish off these Contours and see if this does the job so I'm much happier now with the way that this hill looks it matches the uh slope of everything in this Valley um and the benefit is that the hot wire cutter is given it sort of like a rock texture um this is going to be changed over time but for the time being it's it's actually it's uh quite convincing and I'm really very happy with it the last thing I'm going to do is just take a rasp and knock down the high spots um and do a little bit of blending but I'm not going to overly work this I'm probably now going to leave this for a while and live with it and maybe make little changes as I go along so for the time being this is great I'm going to run the rasp over really briefly and I'm going to call this [Music] done so that worked out really well um I didn't have a solid plan for how I was going to build up the scenery here and truthfully I didn't really understand what it was going to look like and when I take a look at uh the little scale model I have um I know I wanted some elevations but I didn't really plan out um what that was going to look like so using a little blocks of foam and stacking them like bricks worked really well for me because it let me create as I go I could move them around and get geometries that I liked and elevations that I thought looked good and in my mind that's a lot easier than having to cut up large chunks and try to fit them into place so this was very successful for the way that I want to work so in terms of the volume of foam uh there's a little bit down at the far end of the layout but most of it is behind me here this works out to be uh three 2x 8T sheets of 1in foam I'm hopeful that maybe this gives somebody else um an alternative approach for how you want to build up your land forms uh this was new to me it worked really well for me and maybe it'll work well for you uh one last Quick point was that I did in fact try to straighten out the bent rod on this tool and uh absolutely I did break it just as I predicted and so another productive modeling session comes to a close thanks to clear thinking and proper protection the land takes shape the air remains breathable and Denny lives to model another day thanks for stopping by and we'll see you next [Music] time for