Sanding sticks are great wet or dry, but they wear out quickly. What else can you do then except toss them?

I turn my used sanding sticks into bases for models, especially for small figure vignettes or vehicle. This idea hit me while I was building a 1/72 scale vignette of the Allied landing at Tarawa, featuring a Japanese self-propelled anti-tank gun, a few Shermans, and a landing craft.

To model the water, the beach, the seawall and the island’s surface, I needed several fairly flat layers of  “ground.” Here’s where the sanding sticks came in. Gluing four sanding sticks across gave me a platform 7″ long and just shy of 3″ wide. I made the platform two deep (I have a lot of worn-out sanding sticks!) and four across (upper) and three across (lower), with the lower level sticks reinforcing the joints between the four sticks on the upper.

Once the yellow wood glue was dry, I painted the sanding sticks to seal them. Then, I covered them with spackle to form the groundwork. This was in turn covered with acrylic paint and fine sand from my N scale model railroad scenery stash. In less than a half-hour (not counting drying time) I had just what I needed to provide the beach in front of the seawall. And I did it with items others would throw away.

Tip submitted by:
Ned Barnett
Las Vegas, Nev.