montanan
Whiskey Merchant
I have had a number of people want me to do a post on building my sagebrush trees, so here goes.
In the first picture, the tool use are shown. When cutting the sagebrush, I jsut about need industrial strength pruning shears. The stuff is incredible tough.
A razor saw is needed to cut the bottom of the sagebrush off to a square end. I use rail nippers to trim the sagebrush to the desired shape. Once trimmed, I use a pin vise to drill a hole in the bottom of the cut off end, and then a brass rod is super glued into the hole. It is easier to do it at this stage instead of waiting until the tree is made.
The natural finish of the sage brush does a good job of looking like tree bark.
Here is a piece trimmed and ready to have the brass rod inserted.
I make the trees in two different ways. One is to glue clump foliage to the sagebrush armature, or in this case, polyfiber is used and once on the tree, I'll use a coarse ground foam sprinkled on the polyfiber and then sprayed with the cheapest hair spray I can find.
These are the trees with the polyfiber method. The ones below are the ones with the clump foliage glued to the armature. These do take a but longer to make. I don't glue the trees into place. Around here I have found that gravity does work in all cases so the trees are just inserted into a hole drilled, in my case, into the plywood. This allows you to remove the trees if any work had to be done in the area.
Unfortunately I ran out of both clump foliage and polyfiber so I guess an order will go into MB Klien in the morning. Some shrubs, trash cans and other details will be added to the park area and a few more trees will go in around the homes on the edge of town. The project is moving ahead again.
In the first picture, the tool use are shown. When cutting the sagebrush, I jsut about need industrial strength pruning shears. The stuff is incredible tough.
A razor saw is needed to cut the bottom of the sagebrush off to a square end. I use rail nippers to trim the sagebrush to the desired shape. Once trimmed, I use a pin vise to drill a hole in the bottom of the cut off end, and then a brass rod is super glued into the hole. It is easier to do it at this stage instead of waiting until the tree is made.
The natural finish of the sage brush does a good job of looking like tree bark.
Here is a piece trimmed and ready to have the brass rod inserted.
I make the trees in two different ways. One is to glue clump foliage to the sagebrush armature, or in this case, polyfiber is used and once on the tree, I'll use a coarse ground foam sprinkled on the polyfiber and then sprayed with the cheapest hair spray I can find.
These are the trees with the polyfiber method. The ones below are the ones with the clump foliage glued to the armature. These do take a but longer to make. I don't glue the trees into place. Around here I have found that gravity does work in all cases so the trees are just inserted into a hole drilled, in my case, into the plywood. This allows you to remove the trees if any work had to be done in the area.
Unfortunately I ran out of both clump foliage and polyfiber so I guess an order will go into MB Klien in the morning. Some shrubs, trash cans and other details will be added to the park area and a few more trees will go in around the homes on the edge of town. The project is moving ahead again.
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