This was a fun project with the kids. It made them want to go to Home Depot even though Halloween decorations were not present! Spoiler alert: it was too steep for our SCX24 rigs.
We had two chunks of pink foam-board insulation from a renovation, which proved to be a great RC course-building material. I also have a few replacement panels for our “Race Deck” garage flooring that served as a good tray for the foam. The foam stuck to it enough where ramming the volcano with cars didn’t slide it around.
Cutting the foam was easy with some woodworking Japanese saws. Then, I used a Festool Rotex 90 with a soft pad and 120-grit paper to smooth over the cuts. Any sander will do, but the soft pad helped get around some hard edges.
I did not photograph any of that process because the garage was well below freezing, and I had 30 minutes to do all the carving before we ran out to dinner. The next day, the kids accompanied me on a Home Depot run to pick up:
- Gorilla Grip’s Maximum strength spray adhesive (90 level)
- Spray foam
- Rustoleum rough coat spray in tan
- White spray enamel
- Gray spray paint
- Red tractor spray paint
- Orange tractor spray paint
The spray adhesive glued the layers together, the rough coat helped provide some traction, spray foam made the lava, and the rest was for coloring.
The adhesive and spray foam worked immediately in my freezing garage, but the rest didn’t. I had to grab a portable heater. Being too close to the heater caused some foam boards to melt, split, and shrink. I think it added to the rock look.
It was a bummer that none of our cars could scale the volcano. I was looking forward to playing The Floor is Lava with the kids with a King of the Mountain twist. I will carve this volcano a little more and add more spray foam “rocks” to make it scalable. For my first attempt at doing any of this, I’m pleased with how it came out and how quickly we got it done.
