Chute!

The chute is a great feature. I’m proud of the overall effect of it. However, the pouring of the sand needs slowing down. It’s gravity and mass, you can’t scale it down. 

I’m using Woodland Scenics” fine ballast for my sand and it just falls straight into the skips, and the “sand” can bounce out. I needed something to slow things down. A baffle, a filter. I knew I had some  3.5mm scale wire mesh fence that I thought would be perfect. But I couldn’t find it. (I bet it’s with the track spikes I can’t find). Then as I was doing the grocery shopping with my wife. I saw one of these.

A sink strainer

It was only a couple of dollars. I thought it was worth the experiment. I cut a section of mesh out of the strainer, and placed it in the chute and tried it. It slowed the flow down a great deal, but the material was clogging up the strainer. I guess that’s what the strainer is supposed to do. But not what I wanted it to. So I decided to make the holes larger. I kept poking at the mesh, making the holes larger, until I got a flow I was happy with. 

The filter in place

Tipping into the skip, thinned out and slowed down

A slower tip seems to result in a more rounded pile of sand

A new bucket

At the other end of the chute I added a new bucket. The original one was small and I had to fill it with a teaspoon. One spoon at a time. A pretty slow process. It was simple to make one large enough to take a skip loads worth of  “sand”. Having made one it seemed a sensible idea to make two of them. The second one would be used to fill the first. That way I’d get pretty much the same amount in the skip every time. That sounds like a winning idea to me.

Consistent filling

The skips are filled with a consistent amount, and the rounded pile of material is pleasing to the eye. This has really worked well. What do I work on next?