After having “built” and installed nearly 70 Supertrees, I have mixed emotions about them. It seems I still need about 30 trees to complete my switching layout, and I am contemplating trying another brand of trees, preferably ones that are ready made. Here’s some explanation on the process of building Supertrees.
The process is rather involved and somewhat time consuming; the trees in their natural state out of the box are twisted and bent nine ways from Sunday, which requires boiling the trees on the stove and hanging them upside down on a clothesline, with weight clipped on the end, while they dry. This procedure straightens them out. I boiled my trees for 30 minutes over medium heat, then clothes-pinned them to mason cord suspended between two sawhorses. I recommend putting a tarp under the sawhorses to catch any stray water. The smell produced by boiling Supertrees is akin to that of boiling cabbage. Not terrific, but yet not overwhelming either. It took four separate runs, or “batches”, as I call them, to boil all 68 of my Supertrees, due to the size of the pot I used to contain them on the stove. It pretty much amounted to an entire evening of work just to boil them. Once out of the boiling bath, I suspended them from the mason cord and clipped 3 to 4 clothespins from the opposite end of each tree to serve as weight. I then allowed them to dry for three days.
Once dry, the Supertrees will shed their green color and return to a wheat color, and you’re ready for the next step; which is soaking each tree in matte medium for a couple of minutes, and then putting them back on the clothesline to dry again. This step alledgedly helps preserve the tree and make it slightly more flexible and resilient. Allow to dry overnight.
Next comes painting. I installed the 68 trees on blocks of 2-inch pink foam scraps left over from the construction of my layout. I left 5 to 6 inches of space between each tree so I could get at them from all angles with a spray can. I used Rust-Oleum Dark Gray Automotive Primer to paint the trees; it took three cans to fully coat all 68 trees. Yet again, I allowed the trees to dry for a few days.
Once the paint had dried, I began putting the foliage on my trees. I sprayed each tree down with matte medium and sprinkled on Woodland Scenics Dark Green and Light Green coarse turf from their respective shaker cans. You want to stay above the top of the tree, since that’s where most of the sunlight hits a prototype tree, and thus that’s where the leaves tend to grow. Once I had achieved an appearance I liked, I sprayed yet another liberal coat of matte medium on them to seal everything and set them aside to dry for the final time. I left 4 or 5 of the trees bare to simulate dead trees; since I am modeling springtime I also went sparingly on the foliage on some trees more than others; these represent ‘late bloomers’.
Planting a tree on a foam-based layout is a simple matter of poking a hole with an awl or tweezers and then placing the trunk of the tree in the hole after it has been coated at the bottom half-inch or so with white glue. This is where one of my beefs with the Supertrees comes in; seems they are still quite fragile despite the matte medium treatment. I broke three or four of them off at the bottom trying to insert them into their holes. I worry how they will fare if they are bumped.
The trees look great, but are fragile and labor-intensive. I’m thinking I may try some of the ready-made trees from several manufacturers to fill out the balance of my layout.
