Old oak common (N part 25)...

No, not that one, another step on the N scale journey, trees, and in this case one in particular I've always wanted to try to replicate, a common oak...

There is nothing unusual or ground breaking in it's construction - inspired mainly by Gordon Gravett's techniques, but using elements of YouTube videos and my own childhood teaching by my Dad this has been a wonderfully calming experience. Taking pairs of individual strands fro 45A car electrical cabling (which you can buy by the metre on eBay) and spinning them up by hand (or in my mini drill) before cutting, twisting and pairing them up, and up, to create segments, parts of the tree. The key to the oak is it's knarly twisted form and this is just random kinks placed in opposing directions along lengths and at junctions. Bringing the segments together and wrapping them with more strands of copped for strength, a few extra branches were superglued in lower down (these could have been added with solder). The basic tree was complete.

I then applied neat PVA to the lower trunk to fill the gaps. Once dry my bark mixture (PVA, powdered filler and touch of water with brown burnt umber paint) was painted on liberally - this dries quickly and can be re-applied to increase thickness or smooth out twists of wire showing through. Using a tacky static grass glue painted onto the ends of the branches I then applied 4mm static fibres rubbed between my fingers over a piece of paper so I could keep re-applying them until I was satisfied - adding small twig branches quite convincingly to add more finesse to the structure. A coat primer followed by one of Humbrol enamel got us to the stage above. Note the knot on the centre branch, this was an experiment, a dot of PVA left to nearly dry, and then poked in the middle with a pin. Remember this is N gauge, and whilst large in scale, this tree is small in size.

The quandary of how to finish her then reared its head. In my experience either commercial tree foliage or home made with postiche and scatter has the habit of hiding your structure. I decided that I needed to try and add some leaf cover but would go very light and just add this to the branches. Neat PVA was applied to the branches and new twigs and Greenscenes scatter rubbed between fingers over this whilst rotating the tree in my fingers to get it all covered.

So here we are, an improbable tree for the location, but since Paxton Road is a test of ideas in N I'll let that slide, I'm proud of what I've achieved so far, it's not quite finished, I need to paint some of the branches white the matt varnish has dried a little shiny, and perhaps add some colour variation in the trunk through dry brushing, as well as needing to add some root structure around the base, but it's another tick for me - the same processes I use in the larger scale can be finessed and shrunk down for N. If you've got a layout scheme you've never considered to have space for, perhaps today's quality offerings of ready to run models in the scale could tempt you to try it out? Combined with the quality track from British Finescale, fine DG couplings and some tried and trusted modelling techniques I'd argue it is as feasible today as British O scale is - well worth taking a second look. Until next time, more soon...