Making the Slate Appearance
Since we had spare slate tiles from recent work on the house, we decided to make the slate mine have a facing of real slate. The slate tiles were broken and cut up. This necessarily gave a range of sizes. These were graded to make selection easier. The range of size is shown in the left hand picture below.
It was diffucult to glue the slate pieces onto the expanded foam which made the vertical surfaces. So pieces of stiff cardboard were cut to the correct shapes and the slate glued onto those. These could then in turn be glued to the vertical foam surface. The picture on the right shows the effect.
Apart from the larger pieces of slate, smaller pieces were added with spray glue or small “dobs” of glue to increase the realistic effect. On horizontal surfaces the very fine grade was sprinkled over and spray glued in place with other small random pieces in naturally falling positions.
Two other areas of the slate mine are pictured below.
