 Hi, I'm Joshua Barton and May's What's Neat starts right now. The What's Neat show is sponsored by Lombard Hobbies, your value hobby shop for over 40 years of modelers helping modelers. Big inventory, value pricing, fast shipping and great service. This is What's Neat from May 2021. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month George Bogatuck shares with us how to weight our freight cars and locomotives with low melting point metals. It's kind of interesting to see what he does this month. Also in this video I do layout construction this month and I share with you how I decorated this very flat diorama that I've got with a scene where the track, the Code 55 track is buried in the dirt and we've got a loading facility and I walk you through the process of static grass, ground foam, gravel, how to make roads, railroad crossings, how to paint your track, all the different temps necessary in order to do a simple flat section just like this for video run-bys. And also I'd like to thank Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois for sponsoring the What's Neat show and helping us promote the best hobby in the world. Thank you so much for supporting them. Check out their website at LombardHobby.com and thank you so much to the folks that watched the What's Neat this week video show podcast on YouTube every single week that we record to keep you updated on what's new in the hobby with a lot of special guests and a lot of very interesting interviews. And so with that, let's continue on with the rest of May 2021 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, we're going to do something just a little bit different. I'm working on this module again after about a year hiatus on it. The last video that we showed on this, I shared with you how I built the whole entire module, how I wrapped it in wood, worked it into place here and it turned out to be a really good module in the fact that I can park in stage three trains on it and I can reach all the way into it because it's not that deep. So now we're finally to the point of starting the scenery. We ended the last video showing how to lay the track, glue it down, super elevate the curves on this section of diorama and then everything was painted to an earth tone color after the foam was carved. So now I'm putting down some roads. This is a video that I made for What's Neat some time back where I showed how to make roads using cement material from DAP. And this material is still available at the Home Depot in smaller containers, but it's the same consistency cement bed of peanut butter, but it's latex. So it doesn't crack even after seven years. You can pull up this road and it'll literally bend like a linoleum. It stays flexible. It doesn't crack, which why it's perfect for what we want for making roads on our layout. At least it works for me. But this part of the video isn't going to be so much about making the roads as it is. I've got a segment here where I want to build an access on this Code 55 rail through here. And I want to be able to make it so that we can park a train, have a loader unload the train, flat car, something like that. A simple offload point where they've got a substantial surface that's more strong than say just gravel. And that would be the cement and we're going to treat it as if it's simple black top. That's the idea for this. So I'm going to share with you that this road here was poured just last night. Austin Allard Mitchell Buffoden helped me and I shared with them how to do this project. They shot some B-roll, which I'm showing right now of us spreading the road between some forms with a putty knife, a four inch putty knife, which lends itself well to this. And also working across the railroad crossings, which were already put into place. I'll tell you how I did that. I took HO scale railroad ties and what I generally do is I'll stagger them, but I'll cut them so that they're two ties on the outside of the rails. And I've got about five ties on the inside of the rails for my width of what I'm doing here. And all I do is I cut them to length. I use a liberal amount of wood glue, which I'm sure I'm going to show you B-roll of this because I did videotape the process, where all of the ties were glued into space into place with a lot of glue. The more glue the better. It doesn't really affect the trains other than you have to clean the glue up out of the flangeways. But you're going to also do that when you work a... I like to use generally a metal cutting saw, a bandsaw blade that it cuts six inches long. And I run it back and forth into the groove, cutting out my flangeway into the wood. Then once the railroad crossing surface is completed and it's solid and it's dry, that's when it's time to go ahead and build your roads. The one thing about the roads it's very important to talk about is I lay the road one segment at a time. So the main road will get laid and then the adjacent road or the adjacent parking lot that will put into the main road can then be poured separate. It does two great things. A, it gives a transition of where the old road starts so it's obvious they weren't all built at the same time. And also when we put India ink on these roads to darken them, sometimes I put a lighter coat on the secondary roads and it makes a really amazing effect. Like I did, I can show you a video clip here of this railroad crossing with a train wreck saloon in it. And if you look, the parking lot is a different shade, much lighter shade of black top than the main road is. And that's the difference between one coat and two coats of India ink applied to the road surface. So what we're going to do is I'm going to pull out these forms, these wooden forms that held in the cement last night. And I'm using a razor blade right now to separate the forms from the cement just to make sure that they come out clean. And then we're going to continue this road all the way down here and create an area here where the cement is going to go right over the top of this Code 55 track. We're going to trowl it all smooth and then we'll cut our flangeways and make sure it's just right to unload say a flat car right there in that location. So let's see what happens next. So now we're ready to spread our cement and put it onto our scene and make this area along the Code 55 track where we want all of this scenery and this black top to look. Now there's a couple of things that I had to do in preparation before we could start this new road. And that is I needed to remove the forms from the existing road that I just poured along here. So what I did was I took a razor blade and I worked carefully cutting the form away from the cement so that it wouldn't pull the cement as the wooden forms came up. I slowly pulled up these pieces of wood on both sides of the road and then I sanded down the roads to try to smooth the areas where there were some high spots and also I wanted to sand along where these railroad crossings are right here. Very important to have a nice smooth transitions so that your vehicles when they drive across it, it's going to be smooth. Now I did use some red sandpaper when I was sanding down this area and I don't suggest you did that, do that, not with this type of red garnet paper because it left a red residue on the road which I had to go back and clean up with water because I didn't want that affecting the color of the scenery at all. So I'm adding these new forms that you see right here along the road and that's going to give me my transition from the old road onto this black top service road that we're developing and so I took some small pieces of strips of wood and I pressed push pins into the wood to hold this into place so that as we spread our cement it's going to give a nice even coat at the top. Also on the push pins I cut off the top of the pins. Now in this other area as we work this cement along here I'm not going to use forms on this area other than just on the very edge. So after going through the entire scene and sanding it I vacuumed everything up all nice and clean and then I also cleaned up some of the messy cement that had ended up out here on the track work. It didn't look real good mixed in between the ties so I wasn't happy with that and I wanted to clean that up which is what I did. So now we're to the point where we're actually going to get started on this project and I want you to watch it real time as I work on this and spread this material on our layout. I'm going to put the camera in position here so that you can see exactly what we're doing as we do it to spread this damp concrete and mortar repair material in between the forms creating our road. I've also got a bottle of water handy here just like peanut butter. I'm not worried about the cement that's getting on the outside here I can clean that up and use it. I think that's all I'm going to need for the forms. I'm not getting any cement on the track which in this case is wonderful. I'm going to wet it and start pulling this out smooth cleaning my trial just like that. I'll put the rest of the material here and this is the area where we are going to end up covering up these tracks. With the cement which is going to make a mess but it's going to be a controlled mess. I've got one area over here to fill in which you can go back and do and I'll draw the knife across the whole area one more time. So far that looks absolutely perfect. I'm going to clean up some of my mess here on the edges and put all this material back over here. I'm going to draw the knife one more time on this area just to make sure that the road is very smooth. That is perfect. Now I'm going to reposition the camera here. As we work into this larger parking lot area I'm going to use a small trawl and start spreading the material and at least getting it into place. I'm not going to put this on very thick. Just about the height of the rail is the thickness that I'm going to do over here. I'm going to let it stop somewhere in this area right here. I'm going to pull it right over the track because that's eventually going to all end up. I'm putting it right on top of the track now. I'm putting down quite a bit of material but we're going to peel off a lot of this material too. I'm going to just make sure it's making good contact with the foam so that the cement sticks good to all the rough foam that it has to adhere to right here. See that? I know it looks like a mess now. It does look like a mess. I could envision using a wider trawl on this area like a nice wide tapers knife. That should be enough material for this whole area. Pretty sure I don't want any more material here. I'm going to go grab a larger tapers knife and use that. I've got a 12-inch and an 8-inch tapers knife and I think I'm going to use the 8-inch drywall tool here for this because it'll pull it all at the same time smooth and this is a clean knife. Let's see what happens as I try to do this. I'm going to wet it with the water and the knife. My small trawl right here under the camera, let me get that. I see something I want to fix right here real quick before I go any further. I'm going to pull it as far this direction as I want to go with it. Wet everything one more time and draw this whole area right on top of the tracks. I'm pulling it very slow. I'm using both hands to weigh things down. I'm riding along the wood I have on the edge here. I'm going to stop it right here just like that. Now I'm going to wet it one more time over the whole area one more time to make sure it's all smooth because this is just perfect so far. This is real time. No editing. This is how you do it. It's very simple and very quick. To clean out the flangeways, I simply run a car with deep flanges. This European Thomas train through the cement and that'll help clear out the flangeways to give me a good start when this sets up. So after the cement dried for 48 hours, now today it's time to color it and put our coloring with India ink onto the roads. Now as soon as this dried, I cut the forms off this area of the layout. On either side of this road, I pulled the wooden pins out and used a razor blade to separate the wood from the cement so it wouldn't tear the cement and then pulled up the forms, the wooden forms that were holding everything into place. I also sanded the road here just to get out any rough spots or any high spots that may have been on it. So as you look over here towards the railroad tracks, I cut a ravine right here so that there would be proper drainage of the water from the loading area and the track edge and the ballast line here so that the water would run away from both spots. And I did that using a curved or a bent rasp which worked out really well and of course I sealed it with latex paint. I also cut the flangeways clean here on the main loading area using a cut old short hexaw blade which is just the right width for flangeways. It helped clean out where the freight car didn't as I ran it through. I then sanded the entire loading area really smooth just again to get rid of any of the high spots that may have been on there with some 100 grit black sandpaper. I then patched the cracks in the road in various areas just to make sure that the expansion and the shrinkage of the first coat would then be followed up with our second coat of cement. And so that brings us to the point now where I'm going to apply the India ink to the diorama and give us the color for our road. And in order to do that if you refer back to the video that I mentioned which was September 2016 what's neat I actually showed you how I mixed this very India ink in this jar and I said that they would last over 10 years and sure enough and all this simply is is alcohol with two eyedroppers of India ink mixed into this great big mason jar. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this simple staining house paint brush which is about an inch and a half and I'm going to dip it in the India ink and start applying one coat to the roads and to the parking lot area right here. No streaks, no worries. And I'm also going to do the road in our whole entire loading zone with the same India ink material. It gives a nice dark almost a black top effect as it soaks into the cement and I will end up putting two coats of this India ink onto our diorama here and letting it soak in and I will let this dry for about 8 hours between coats. Now after I put down two coats of this I'm going to take the railroad ties in this area right here and I'm going to paint them varying shades of white and black just to give a little bit of a weathering effect to this area then I'm going to cover the whole area with ground foam and backyard dirt, maybe build a little shoulder on the road but this track isn't going to be ballasted it's going to be buried in the dirt so that eventually I'll come through with after I spray it with woodland scenic cement to dry to glue everything into place I'm going to follow it up while it's wet with a static grass gun and what it will do is it will give me grass growing right here on the main line area or actually on the siding track where I want the track to literally be buried in the dirt and I just want the grass to simply be coming through and just kind of making the rail sort of disappear and so that will finish off this area so let's do all of those quick steps real quick and let's see how this final thing turns out so after the glue dried overnight I came back the next day and I cleaned the rails of our track that's absolutely in the dirt with a bright boy I used the edge of a bright boy cleaner and cleaned the inside of the rails and the top of the rails and it didn't affect or disturb any of the dirt or the static grass that was standing up I then vacuumed up all the residue and crumbs from the abrasive cleaner and also there was an area on the layout where I actually right here I ballasted the main line I want to show you this and I had gotten some static grass on the main line so I used a toothbrush and drybrushed off the static grass and that worked out really well for removing static grass in an area where I didn't want it but as you can see now the track is literally buried in the dirt you know as you saw in the previous video that I made on this I in fact routed out the track tied depth into the foam and so the road and all of the grass and all of the dirt makes the track simply disappear as a siding that's not used that often here's our area where we've got the surface where I envision some sort of a family business where the family simply unloads loads or loads them and that's what they do it's a really neat little section of the layout quite simple to make the interesting thing is the code 55 track buried in the grass and the dirt the double track main line also got ballasted so it's time to complete this module and work on it some more as time goes by but that was this segment that I wanted to talk about and show you how to build a surface work with various different scenery materials to get an end result that I think is really cool for this module and so with that that's the segment for what's neat Hey guys, George at Soundtracks here and in this installment of what's neat this week we're going to take you through a new way of adding weights to our models that I found now this is a fairly recent discovery and so I wanted to share that with you guys so that you can add weight to your models so let's head upstairs to the workbench and let me show you the cool things I found from Cerro Metals called Cerro Bend and Cerro Low so let's get started okay now here I am at the workbench and we're going to try and add a little bit of weight to these two models first of which we're going to do this one with a method that you've seen in the past we're going to remove the fuel tank and there's a screw that just right there on the bottom this is an athern GP40 take that screw set it aside and then our fuel tank will just pull right off now you'll notice the inside of this is flat but the outside of the fuel tank is rounded and that's because as you can see here there's a lot of excess space inside these sides here that can be filled with weight so what we're going to do is we're going to use our Cerro Bend metal and we're going to melt it and we're going to drop it into this we're going to fill this up and use it as weight so the first thing we want to do is we want to make sure this thing stays upright so we're just going to grab in this case, solve a set we're just going to use a little bit of that I'm going to move this light a little bit so you can see a little bit differently so now you can see that the hollow is right here so what we're going to do is we're just going to simply take our metal and remember it's a low temp this is the 158 and when you're doing this using a soldering iron you're going to melt it and I don't recommend you use the same soldering iron that you're using for your electronics because I'm not sure what's in this metal alloy and we don't want anything that's in here potentially corroding or attacking the electronics so this is going to be really easy this just drops right on you can see it's melting and it just starts dripping into the cavity here the biggest challenge in this is making sure that you don't get your soldering iron against the bottom of the fuel tank because you can potentially melt it if you hit the plastic directly with your soldering iron so you want to make sure that you're very careful not to do that oops just let the metal melt and fill this gap just like this I'm going to stop for the moment and just let you take a peek and see what it looks like clean our soldering tip off you kind of see how that metal is filling inside the area and you can see we got a little bit on the outside here good news is we haven't damaged anything so we can just pop that off and then we can just weather it off as spillage but it takes a few minutes to cool but as you notice it doesn't change or warp anything on the outside here and the biggest challenge is not moving it before it's ready because you can kind of see here this little wave right here was done before it was fully cooled and so I have to go back and heat that up make sure that that's all below the line because you do not want to and just like that just heat it up so you want to make sure that that stays below the edge so that that way this fuel tank will fit perfectly back on the spot so it's still little liquid you can kind of see that we'll let it sit a little bit longer so it's becoming a little bit more solid now so you can see how this doesn't exceed the edge of this so we put our fuel tank back on we'll be able to fit it so there you go give it another second or so to cool and we'll take a look at the that up close you can see that the metal is in there and there you go you can see it's fully formed so now it's cooled and you look at the outside of our fuel tank and it's still perfect so this is a great way to add some extra weight to your HO diesels because once we attach this to the fuel to the fuel tank underneath there it'll give it a little bit extra weight down low so it'll lower the center of gravity and make it a little bit more you know give it a little bit extra power when it's pulling so now we can take this take this up here we'll get our screw again you can tighten it right back you'll never know the difference now I'm going to fill this up and see just how much weight fits in here so you'll be able to see how much you're adding to the fuel tank so I'll do that and I'll be right back okay now you can see that I've got both sides filled and both sides have weight in it so after measuring it I forgot to measure this before I put it on but I measured it before I put in the second half and I've decided that this comes in and adds an extra ounce of weight to our model by filling this section in using this Sarah Bend 158 so that'll add a little bit of extra heft to it and it actually feels pretty heavy considering so then again you know we've got our metal in here now we just simply take that grab our screw and now we've added that extra ounce so now our GP40 measures at 14.6 ounces which should be a decent pole for locomotive of that size so next up let's take this exact rail hopper car now you can see under here there's some spaces where we can add a little bit of weight they're not very big so they're just fairly small openings but this by adding a little bit of weight you'll be able to run these cars as empty because they've also detailed the inside pretty good you don't have to run them as loaded with the loads in it now the other option is you can fill look at all that extra space up inside the co-load there that you can fill with weights but the only downside is that would make the car top heavy a little bit so we're gonna try this out so we're gonna put all this together we're gonna put this car on the scale here and we're gonna measure this at 3 oz 3.1 ounces so we're gonna see how this goes now in this particular case I'm gonna use the serilo which is the melding point of 117 so we're gonna take this and this is just a small chunk that I have that I broke off of the of this here but let's go ahead and just gonna take this and heat it on and we're just gonna drip it into just like that that may be a little much but once this is done you can paint these so that that way it doesn't show it's ever been in the that you can a lot easier to hide so there we go, there's a quick addition of the serilo into the hopper now you can see it's still liquid it's still flowing so we're gonna give it a second or so to cool and you can do this with flat cars you can do this with any of these gondolas like this that have just a little bit open above because most of the time you're looking at the car not from the underside but from the side or downward on it so seeing these little openings throughout the underside of the car becomes a lot a lot less likely and once you touch it up with some paint weather it up you'll never see it and like I said the best opportunity is that it doesn't affect the plastic at all especially this serilo this stuff melts at 117 degrees so it doesn't need a whole lot of heat and so on this particular soldering iron I'm using this on low uh low temperatures let's see it's starting to harden a little bit alright well what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go in and do the rest of these bays and fill them up with the weight and then we'll do a before and after weight comparison just to see it may not be a whole lot but it adds a little bit and any little bit of extra weight helps add an attractive effort onto the car so I'm gonna do that and be right back okay guys after I've added the weight here to the bottom which like I said wasn't gonna add a whole lot but I did also put some weight here a significant amount on the inside of this co-load so now we're gonna put the two together and we're gonna measure it just like we measured originally now we come up to 4.9 ounces so that's a significant increase over what we did before now granted most of this weight was inside the co-load but an empty car now weighs the 3.1 ounces so 3.2 ounces that we measured before we took out the co-load so the good news is is that this is an easy process to add weight to your models and hopefully this will be helpful for you and like I said we can make a significant difference in your models okay just wanted to add a couple of things here really quickly number one once you paint the underside here you can see that the weight virtually disappears especially looking at it from a side view so you do want to make sure to take a few moments paint the weight to make sure it disappears number two and this is a big caution with this sarah low remember it melts at 117 degrees and the biggest challenge here is to make sure that if you're packing your models away in the garage or even carrying them in the back of an open pickup truck or something like that where the sun could come down storing them inside your car while you run in the grocery store just keep in mind that those temperatures can get hot and this metal can melt again remember it's only 117 so in that case the 158 might be a better choice for you since as we've shown it also doesn't affect the plastic you know regardless of how you're putting it on so select your metals as your model sees fit you know I bought this this was a one pound block that was you know from the sarah metals was close to a hundred dollars and then this was a quarter pound stick I found on an ebay seller for about ten dollars so you guys can find the weights obviously if you have open inside of box cars things like that you've got plenty of space to put weights so expensive metals like this aren't necessarily necessary but just something to keep in mind and you know moving forward when you decide to use this in your modeling well guys I hope this has been helpful for you whether you're using sarah bend or sarah low hopefully this has been helpful for you I know I had a apprehension to melting metal and pouring it in my plastic models but after doing it a little bit I found out you know what it's really not that difficult it's not that hard and it really does help help us add weight where we may not have been able to add weight before so guys thanks for that if you have any questions feel free to comment below and we'll hope to see you guys next time thank you