Yesterday I made myself a vibrator, this morning I got to try it out. Here it is.
It's an old 3v motor with a brass insert from a choc bloc fixed to the shaft. It's on a long wander lead from an old Hornby train set controller. I had an idea that it might help with ballasting the layout. You should be able to tell from the photo that the motor is fixed to a brass plate bent over at the edges to straddle the rails. You should also be able to see that the track is pinned down to a dense foam underlay, a 4mm thick yoga matt.
First job was to paint the rails and sleepers, Halfords red oxide and matt black spay cans made short work of this.
The rail heads were burnished with a Peco track rubber before ballast (tinted sharp sand) was spooned on and roughly smoothed out with finger and brush. The next stage is where vibrator comes into its own. I sit it on the rails of the ballasted portion then turn the speed up gradually until it's possible to see odd individual grains of ballast which sit on the sleeper tops start moving. As long as one hasn't been heavy handed with the ballast a pass or two with the vibrator seems to even out the ballast between the sleepers and that on the shoulders and rattle it away from the chairs and sleeper tops. It's not perfect but it does help.
Finally a shot of the ballast done, misted over with water from a perfume atomiser and soaked with diluted copydex (an experiment). It's a bit hard to tell what the final result will be yet. It's probably going to take overnight and maybe some more to dry off from this state.
![vib 2.jpg vib 2.jpg](https://www.westernthunder.co.uk/data/attachments/128/128058-6cc98da4f8f9d6254429b9db415e6d61.jpg)