 Hi, I'm Daniel Coombs and the August What's Neat is going to start right now. The What's Neat Show is sponsored by Caboose, sharing our passion for trains since 1938. This is What's Neat for August 2018. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month, Ron Pear comes by all the way from Canada and shows us how to color brick buildings and add details to them. We look at Rick Huntrod's beautiful HON3 layout, its gorgeous Colorado scenery all in a room-sized layout. We also look at Pete Doty's HO Scale Warf layout. Mike Buddy stops by this month and shows us how to make wrecked load freight cars and automobiles using aluminum foil. Dave Davis and I lay a section of track about 11 feet long with jointed rail and joint bars with a complete sound effect to go along with that. And of course we've got Steven M. Conroy's beautiful drone footage from Southern California of Union Pacific Business Train with number 1943 locomotive on the lead. So it's gorgeous California drone footage this month to look at. And that's the lineup for August 2018 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat this week, we're going to do a recap of the aluminum foil technique that we talked about in past episodes. I think it was Tyler Sneed that brought this up on Facebook of the wrecked freight cars and scrap loads that you can use foil for. We did this one in one of the prior episodes I'm sure Daniel can tell which one it was. And I also used the foil technique to do this auto rack, damaged auto rack too, with the vehicles inside. So this time I'm going to concentrate more on showing you the vehicles and how I do damage on the vehicles to be pretty realistic. So these these vans inside here were crushed from both ends and now these vans were just picked up. These are the ones that represent vans that were drivable enough to get back on the auto rack. But you can see that the damage where you blend the foil into the original model it can be pretty realistic once it's painted and weathered and scraped and everything. So I'm going to show you how to do that, just take a piece of foil and use some of those cheap vans that everybody was getting from Wal-Mart a few years ago. And I would prepare a van, if I was going to crush in the top I would take another van and cut out portions that I was going to do damage to. This way you take a Kleenex q-tip finger and the longer you spend on it the neater job you will get out of it. So you can see how you get the basic shape if you're careful and take your time unlike what I'm doing here. I don't know if you can see around that auto rack. Where you get the corners you'll have to fold over you've got to try and plan your folds so that you can really compress it down along the sides. Anyway, when you get to a casting you like cut it out around the outline of a vehicle maybe along a door seam a place where it will be easy to blend into the other vehicle. Put the foil piece on top of the car that you have cut out in this case. I had a van that I had cut the corner out and I added plastic doors. I bent the bumper up a little bit and just had a little bit of fun with that. So here's some other cars that I've done using the same technique foil making different parts. Here's the same thing this little 55 Chevy that's got hit from behind do the same thing just take a piece of foil and try and plan where your corners are going to be so you can sort of hide that crease and you'll master it after a while after you do it a few times. I would mold this all the way up to the door cut the door seam right at the door seam there outline the wheel wells and everything and glue it on there paint it and then carefully bend it. So I don't know some of you might have seen the Volkswagen scrap yard full of wrecked VWs that I did I think Ken has some some footage of that but way a good way to use foil for other things is it's really good for fences around this scrap yard. I had pieces of four by eight siding. I made that this is a piece of a rick's products warehouse modern warehouse. I would cut an eight foot scale high strip of foil and then do the same thing carefully I'm in a big hurry now but carefully make a nice long strip a decent impression when you get to the way you like it turn it over and put some Elmer's glue or white glue on this spread it out a little bit let it dry overnight that way when it's dry in the morning that will give a lot of strength to this and then in the case of the scrap yard I made two long strips of this one green and one white then I cut it into four foot pieces so it was four by eight sheets and alternated those on the scrap yard fence so you can use foil for all kinds of things besides fences make impressions of corrugated siding corrugated metal like for awnings I made a quonset hut that's visible in one of the Volkswagen scrap yard photos there's a quonset hut I made all the foil the same way it's good for all kinds of details scrap metal and freight and gondolas and junk yards but you can use your imagination with it I'm sure you can find a lot of other uses but it's something that a lot of people overlook and it's fun to try so give it a try I'll talk to you next time on What's Deep this week for this segment of What's Neat I've got a real treat today I'm with Pete Doty who appears to model a beautiful railroad along the water the warf scene the whole bit Pete what's the name of this gorgeous layout this is the Seattle Terminal Railway District and it is a conglomeration of seven different railroads that came into Seattle at various times it was led by the Great Northern who actually created Seattle as a terminal and so it it ended at Seattle very cool and so what era is this layout 1948 post-war jobs are scarce operators and engineers are very excited to be working for a guy named Nash who drives around the district and writes train orders for them and when he sees a locomotive or a crew that's sitting there not doing anything he hands them the order now it looks like all your buildings are sort of built at an angle on this warf area where you've got your street running I'm really impressed with the way you've designed that what maybe you come up with that angle design I did a lot of research on Seattle and that's actually how the wars were built so I built all these with scratch there is one that is a Walther's kid that I messed around with and it's right in the middle of the lab the big gray war remember that one I shot they had photos for that a long time ago yeah built all those scenes municipal peer yeah very nice very nice now also I see you've got a lot of trackage on here what's your preferred trackage that you use I'm using code 100 and Pico turnouts code 100 Atlas and Pico turnouts and I think your DCC what type of system do you like NCE so it's good for you to use radio throttles well there's a couple things that go hand-in-hand my operating group uses it and the guy across the street named Dave Klingman is kind of an expert he uses it too so he said the magic word operating do you operate this layout yes six operators or five operators and one clerk and the clerk is actually the dispatcher if you notice over my shoulder here there's a pickle board and we call it what do we call that oh yeah Clyde it's a car location indication device experiment that's awesome so you've got all these guys that get together and operate with you and when you say part of the magic of this hobby is those folks that you meet absolutely absolutely we get together for lunch once a week just a bunch of us diverse interests we enjoy each other's company to paraphrase a gal at the funeral of her husband I miss Chuck but she said it's an extraordinary group of gentlemen and I just you know we don't have a lot of cussing and swearing the wives actually like each other and so it's you know it's a it's a good group that sounds awesome Pete well thank you very much for sharing this with the viewers of What's Neat my pleasure we're talking about the old joint bar how long was the rails 39 feet 39 feet six inches so 39 and a half so 39 and a half feet is how far which created an old familiar rhythm a sound that if you've ever heard as a child the sound of a freight train going over a jointed rail segment rail 39 and a half feet staggered but they also click any clack right it's a sound that's almost like familiar to you but you haven't heard it in a long time and you didn't even know you knew that sound but it's immediately recognizable when you hear it now I've got a section of track that runs through the laundry room sink area here and I'd like to notch out the rails because what it'll do is it'll allow the train to be a little bit more audible a little bit I can hear it from the other side of the shop and know when it's over here I did the jointed rail as you'll recall on one section of my layout towards the front and we couldn't hear the TV yeah so I relayed that track with smooth welded rail because it was actually too much so let's do that now let's take a dremel motor tool and we've got one right here set up with the small dremel bits that come in a container and let's just notch out the top of our rail and wherever we put a joint bar on the track everywhere we notch it at 39 and a half feet it'll be pretty typically correct with regards to sound and aesthetic so let's see how this comes out when we run a train through it after we notch it out notched out about eight feet of main line running underneath these cabinets to create the sound effect now that we're after the dremel disc that I use is in fact a little bit thicker than the ones that come into the small container it's about it's under a 30 second of an inch but that'll give us a good wide gap to enhance the sound which won't affect the performance of the train in any negative way now while while I was notching this out I noticed that the track was not glued down so rather than to use silicone glue as I normally do I used a little bit of Elmer's wood glue which would give a very firm surface and enhance the sound so now with that let's run a train through this segment of main line and listen to the old rhythm of the rails for this segment of what's neat we're in Colorado Springs we're with Rick Huntrods and we're gonna look at this beautiful HON three layout that he's built now you've seen me work with Blackstone models for almost two years and we've tried everything but I'm telling you what it appears that Rick has nailed it look at the backdrop behind me look at the colors look at all of this stuff this is amazing tell us about this layout thanks a lot yeah I started this layout in 2008 I had a previous HON three layout that I've worked on since 94 and it got to a point of completion I'd had some articles published on it and I felt like there wasn't a lot more I could do and I had some ideas I wanted to do and I wanted to go with sort of proto freelance is what I did here so I modeled Ridgeway Yard I've got Vance Junction I've got Ofer I've got Ridge 45a coming into Ofer and the rest of it is pretty much Southwest Colorado scenery and scenes that look like Southwest Colorado with my own ideas for structures and things like that the nice thing about this Rick is that you've chosen a space that's not too much it's just seems like it's the right size but you've still encapsulated Ofer and Ridgeway and it's just amazing that you were able to do this in such a small space what is the total space you think this is the layouts roughly 12 by 15 12 by 15 room-sized layout that anybody yeah yeah yeah and when I started this we moved into this house in 1998 and I thought about doing what a lot of people do is just take over the room and fill the whole room around the edges or something like that but I thought I would rather have something a little more manageable and I'm really really into scenery a lot and I wanted something that would get to a reasonable stage of completion in a reasonable amount of time so to be honest with you I you don't see a lot of really big layouts that have a lot of fine detail on them and I just like a lot of detail lots of figures lots of cars lots of structures that look complete that's great now what would you guess is a height of your benchwork your trek height that the normal the starting height of the benchwork is about 42 inches and that's a good height for viewing is it good height for viewing some people like higher some people like higher because it looks like you're looking across the scenery I can sit on my stool and be at that level and I do that and it works just fine now are you a lone wolf modeler or did you design this layout to operate with other fellas I'm pretty much alone and I did all of this myself from the benchwork all the way through to scenery completion the structures rolling stock electrical putting DCC and brass locomotives all of that I was going to ask you what kind of DCC system do you like I'm using NCE and then I use all soundtrack decoders and everything great I'm telling you what we're gonna just we're feasting our eyes on this as we're as you're talking it's just eye candy beautiful job in a small space thanks very respected thank you for sharing this with the viewers of what you bet thanks a lot appreciate it my name is Ron Perry and in this segment of what's neat we're gonna talk about brick buildings and the various different colors you can have in those brick and the various different colors that you can have in those brick buildings as well as some details at the end so I started by building this brick structure for a friend of mine Sparky 107 107 on YouTube it was the first time that I used the brick mortar technique that I wrote about in the model railroad hobbyist issue November 2017 and that was a fun build and I used blazing orange rattle can paint for this and it came out to be a very good representation of the historical building or prototype the next building we worked on was the first version of the all-state factory now this is a little rough around the edges this building I understand it was built a long time ago but the point I want to put across is that this is oxide red brick straight out of the rattle can again and it just shows that you know it really doesn't take a lot to make a brick structure also this structure has no mortar lines so maybe you can see the difference with that the third structure that I worked on was the Olympia tool and die-co that we had given to Mike buddy which will be shown on B-roll I'm sure and that was yellow brick just by not painting the brick at all and just using the patina of the laser cutter to give the representation of yellow brick and that was a fun build I was really happy with that but this time we've kind of taken a combination of all the colors now once again we use the blazing orange rattle can paint for the main structure of the wall and we're probably showing video right now of me spray painting the wall and that was a complete coat that I had let dry for 24 hours before moving on and the next step was basically adding a really wild yellow to my orange and sponging it on and just adding a very very a variation to the wall kind of like a sunburst less Paul so we're gonna close out this segment by adding a few details to this structure as you can see we've added the roof details that are available in ITLA's struct our detail kits that they have you can have these to any model now this building is called the all-state factory with the extension on top and both of these kits come with these roof detail portions and I'm going to build the vent that we have for this building and as our last part of the segment here so this is a separately purchased roof detail kit however like I said these details come with these kits so if you've got an extra building that you want to put details on like a water tower on the roof or some air conditioners or chimneys ladders roof access all this stuff is available in this kit but what we're going to work on today are these vent pieces that we glue together so pull them out of the sheet I think there's three different sizes here we'll work on two for now so all you do with these you put them all together and you glue them with your wood glue and we'll be right back after we have glued all these pieces together so we're we have we've glued these off camera just to make it better like who wants to watch glue dry right so we have these put together and we've taken the little structure bands off of the sheet to put them on to the the venting itself so all I'm going to do is I'm going to use two different paints here this is a dark pewter gray and a lighter timeless gray and it doesn't really matter which gray we use we're just using a darker gray to start with and then we're going to come back with a little bit of a lighter gray to add a modulation in between each of the little panels so nice and quick here get my glue out of the cap paint it on fairly liberally let's see that here so while the paints dry we're going to take our lighter paint we're not going to add too much of it I need a place to put extra here just gonna get in between here and kind of dab it in a bit this adds your shadows in between just a little bit of variation kind of finishes up the coloring another good way to get this out is to use your finger spread it out as long as it's a little blotchy that's what we're looking for blotchy is not a problem it's exactly what we want so now that we've got our piece together glue side bring this out we're gonna show that these little details almost immediately even finished add a bunch to the layout just right off the bat like that so now that we've got our little vent done we can add a roof breather here that's an easy one to make just three pieces glue it together paint a gray we have a chimney here we can make and the other pieces to this chimney are right here just paint these oxide red or burnt orange again let's get to building some more of these parts we're not going to get all of them done because we've got a lot of them on the roof right here as you can see the roof access is right here the water tower is right here and all these other parts are here so let's do a roof vent here to get started I'm gonna use instead of my wood glue this time we're gonna use a little bit of crazy glue so that we can get a glue do a little bit quicker but I advise to use wood glue because it works really well on this product or as a matter of fact I use weld bond all the time I could go on and on about well but like I said it's really an easy part to come together this crazy glue just take a couple of seconds for me make sure it sets before you let it go back we're gonna paint this little piece up once again we want to brush off most of the paint so we get all that fine detail to come through if you fill up the detail don't worry you really once it dries it will actually release it'll thin out and allow that detail to show through however you know just try to paint light on it on these edges they're kind of dark if you want to get rid of the darkness sand them down they'll turn light beige however two or three coats of paint will easily cover them up nicely we've got the base of our chimney that we glued all of our micro ply sheets to and we are going to first clean off this darn brush then we're gonna paint it with some terracotta so like I said we got a little bit of terracotta here we're gonna put it on the panel brush off the excess we don't want lots of excess because there's a lot of etched detail in this brick I'm gonna paint this in nice and nice so there's not too much variation it's good to have a solid base coat on this like I said not too much paint but a solid color like I said with the other piece if you've got the burnt edges if they're not coming through nice on you I just tend to spend a little bit more time on them make sure there's a good coat of paint on it not thick but just a good coat of paint now this chimney is not going to get mortar like the other parts of the building takes too long for that for the performance really takes 24 hours for it to dry and when it goes on it doesn't look like mortar but when you wake up in the morning it does so so now that we have these all painted up we're gonna quickly put a little bit of glue like I said I prefer wood glue or weld bond for this we got our little detail parts bring our model over here throw a chimney over here maybe in maybe let's put it on the how do you want it want it there good yeah I think I want it there too so that's the all state factory with the extension by itla scale models calm my name is Ron Perry or just another scale modeler on YouTube and that's this segment for what's neat all of the model railroad products seen in this episode of what's neat are available through caboose in Lakewood Colorado or order online at my cruise calm