 In this What's Neat for October 2015, we talk about tooltips and we cover all the Dremel rotary tools, the old ones and the new ones that are on the market and we have a little discussion about that. In our second segment we discuss layout design and how to draw a track plan and the philosophy behind designing and drawing a track plan. And then later in the show we cover the prototype modelers meat that was here in St. Louis in August 2015. A lot of great in-depth coverage, a lot of interviews. I apologize ahead of time for the sound quality in the interviews. I've got some microphones in the future budget for the show. So enjoy this October 2015 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, this is going to be our layout construction segment where we discuss layout design. And I had an open house for the St. Louis RPM meat, which you'll see a lot of that in this show. And at that show somebody said, oh, I'm working on my track layout design. I'm planning a layout. How do you design the track plan for your layout, Ken? And there was silence. I literally didn't freeze up. It's just that there was so much information in one simple question like that. The answer could have gone on for an hour. And I'm going to try to give the answer right now simply as I can. And a lot of times, I tell you my first train layout that I ever had, my Sears and Roebuck Tyco train, which I've still got the original locomotive from that set, that came with a configuration of a circle and a siding. So it was really easy with planning that layout simply because I was eight years old. And to have a loop of track with a train on it was a dream. So that was my track plan. And what I did was I built off of that with buildings and experimental scenery and slowly incubated with that and learned a lot about how to make a layout scenery and stuff. And that really helped me a lot. But today I'm designing a shelf layout here that you can see. And it's very similar to another shelf layout. In fact, these are both going to be interchangeable. And while designing this section of layout, it's come to my attention that it's really the need of being able to get the cars into this area, be able to get the engine back out to be able to turn the engine around, to have the negotiating operational abilities of your train that a dictates the track plan on this. But also it's really the structures. Now I've got a train station here. I've got the base for it that I think would, you know, go really nice in this area to balance things out. I've got a freight depot here, just kind of another nice kit that we're going to build. I've got the footprint of that kit laid out. And that's dictating where the sightings go. That dictates how I'm going to freelance this scene and lay this design out. Now there's major things really that come into play with designing your layout. And that is how are you going to use your layout? Are you going to use it for operation, where you need a lot of switching and industry and what have you? And then you place your buildings around that? Or are you modeling like I do for my home layout? I model for the run-by effect, where I can go to any one given scene that I've chosen to model for the prototype locations, and I can literally stand there like I'm watching a train and railfan in my own basement. The one important things that really dictate a layout and its design is your minimum radius. What type of equipment do you have? What's the biggest engine you've got? And what's the minimum radius that that power is going to be able to get through? So your radius is dictate your track plan. Another important thing to think about, and this really came into play about 20 years ago, I designed a layout to try to find out what would fit into a 5,000 square foot space. And I wanted to build a layout where I had Union Station, a switch holding yard, things like that that you would find here in town, and model the suburbs of St. Louis and the farmland and da da da da. But what this really instilled into me was in designing this, it was the radiuses that dictated the design, but it was also the aisle space. So if you've got a home layout, you can usually have aisle space as low as two feet. But if you've got a public area, you want four to five feet of aisle space. So between the aisle space and the minimum radius, by putting those two together with a compass on a piece of paper and trying to fill up a 5,000 square foot building, it taught me a lot about what was needed to be thought about for designing your layout. So that's kind of something that really I thought about a lot when gentlemen asked me that question. It's a question that's gotten a multifaceted answer. When I designed the Midwest Valley Modelers Railroad Club, that was a modular club designed for public display. The design of that was you had to have a lot of trains running quickly all the time. So double track mainline with realistic scenery was what my goal was. You also had to have a holding yard to hold a lot of trains so that people could bring their trains, set them up and then run them for the show. So it was really the design of showing off the layout that dictated the track plan and design of a modular type of a layout. So there's a lot of, like I said, a lot of facets, a lot of interesting things to think about when somebody asks you how is it that you design your track layout? And that's what I want to talk about on this segment of what's neat was designing and track planning your layout. For this month's tool tip for the month of October, we're going to talk about a common tool found in everybody's shop and that's the rotary tool that we use for carving, drilling holes and otherwise modeling. Now I can remember way back in the day and about 25 years ago when I first got my first job at a hardware store out of high school and the very first tool I saved all my pennies for was a drum and motor tool which at the time I think they were $30 but that was a lot of money for somebody who was 16 years old. But now we use these tools for so many different things and a key ingredient of these is the torque and the horsepower that these devices come with. You can use them for cutting your track. You can use the wire brush for right prior to putting on your rail jointers for getting off the weathering and the dirt off the track so your solder has a good clean contact. But one of the main purposes that I like the dremels for is when I'm using small number drill bits like number 72 drill bits to put the nut and bolt castings in some of our structures or our trestles and what I like to do is I've got an older dremel here and if you can find one of these at a garage sale or on eBay pick one up now I'm going to tell you why right now. The older dremels work with the old variable speed control so that when you turn these on you can get these down to a very slow speed. I'm talking about 30 or 40 rpm's where you can hold it with your finger and you can literally drill your holes just the way you want to do that. You can't do that with the newer dremels that are on the market because they've got electronics in them that have to have a certain amount of electricity in order for them to work. So the variac that's available for dremel if you can find one of these these are very useful again for helping you build your trestles and drilling your holes. Now on the market there's the newer dremels I picked one of these up about a year ago and I really I really have gotten a lot of great use out of this machine because it does have a lot of torque and it is variable speed so the slow speed is good enough where that when you're drilling holes you can actually slow it down with your finger and drill the hole. Another feature I found and it's worth the $15 is to get this adaptable handle for this tool because this tool when you're using it it's very difficult to hold sometimes and with this handle you can get right in there for cutting your track or just the various things that you can do for carving wood with this. Now the last thing I want to talk about in the rotary tool business is another dremel product and this is one I actually picked up about a few weeks ago this thing's really nice this is a lithium dremel it's got a lithium battery in it now I used to have a cordless dremel prior to this and I found it was great for drilling holes because it's got great slow speeds but the problem was the memory and the battery developed and sooner or later it just quit working with the new tool you've got no problem with memories so this thing is going to operate you know virtually forever and let me tell you what variable speed and it's got a real nice slow speed on it so this is perfect for drilling holes this is really the machine that could cover everything because it's kind of nice not having to have a wire you have to worry about plugging it in every time you want to use it so just kind of want to talk about rotary tools just a little bit there's some really nice ones out on the market if that's something you're looking for you know that's this is uh this is some pretty nice stuff to look at these days in the dremel market. Hi my name is Ken Patterson and in this new video from kenpatterson.com we're going to take all the mysteries out of soldering this is going to be an advanced and beginners video on soldering we're going to discuss soldering your track work and everything that goes into that we're going to talk about soldering all the wiring on your layout and the block wires and how to go about soldering the electrical for a model railroad layout we're going to talk about all the various types of soldering equipment pencil points are the primary tool that we're going to use for the track work in the wiring and then we're going to get into resistance soldering rig a great mystery for many people but if you learn this trait you can actually make some darn good money selling models and building fabricating stuff from scratch out of brass i'm going to show you how i took this beautiful five thousand dollar one half inch scale precision scale locomotive that was destroyed in shipping and absolutely rebuild the model into pristine factory new condition then i also take you through and i show you how i build a light tower actually in this video we're going to take a light tower that i've already built and repair it and i'm going to show you how to go through the process of working on a tugboat building the superstructure handrail steps and the top all lighting and antennas and all that fabrication work all made out of brass there's literally nothing that you can't do with brass and in this video that lasts one hour at kenpatterson.com we're going to cover all the bases and take all the mystery out of soldering for this segment of what's neat this week i've got jim lincoln with me found him at a park bench out here in the middle of nowhere in illinois now you know jim lincoln as co-host of the model railroad hobbyist podcast and you've seen some of his articles in tony cester's model railroad planning that he does for convoc publishing so with that we're going to take a look at what i've heard described on many podcasts and that's your track work jim yep so tell us a little bit about this magnificent work that we're looking at here this is uh was a practice for me to try out some of my 3d printed parts this is a proto 48 number 10 turnout and it was this it uses uh American switching signal parts for the frog and the points but everything else well the tie plates are from monster model works but i 3d printed the hook tie plates and various other parts on the turnout the point of this was i had talked a lot about on the podcast and all these other things about how i was 3d printing these track and would anybody like to see me actually use them yes it was it was a so is this proto 48 is that what this is considered proto 48 this is very very accurate work you can see in some of these close-up shots it's just exquisite work you've spent a lot of time on this how much time have you got in this three feet of track that's a great question um several months i mean this doesn't go you know when someone when you do something like this this isn't a quick process because every tie well every tie is you know distressed but every tie has tie plates every tie plate has at least two spikes per per type particularly right here you know you're talking eight spikes per tie so it just takes it just takes them well man thank you very much for sharing this with us on what's neat thank you very much i want to tell you that was the inspiration about kozak both great brothers helping me a lot on the way to my modeling and now they've created an n-scale layout and i hear they're building a brand new version of their ho scale layouts we look forward to seeing that in the future right now let's talk to mike about this magnificent n-scale layout that we've got to look at today thanks for the n-scale layout layout that we saw that they continue to see that had you know kind of a single theme going on it was so great to see and that ho layout also had signals on so we're standing around that uh at the n-scale and see what it kind of turns out like that and uh we're able to expand the scenes a little more we're able to get more mike tell me how many members you've got how old is this layout now uh the layout itself is about 10 years old now it's when we built our first module it's 2004 um current active membership is about 12 guys but we're spread out throughout the united states we kind of keep in touch on the internet so we've got guys from chicago from Milwaukee from madison and even some guys from washington state to kind of keep in touch it helps um build portions that we put on the layout but being on the internet having a forum that we kind of keep in touch on has kind of helped us grow the base of people that have evolved on our own ourselves well i'm really enjoying looking at this footage of the layout that i was able to capture today the scenes all flow together it's all prototypically accurate uh elinois type scenery now you said you've got a place obviously i guess when you can work on this in order to keep the continuity do you have a place set up yeah one of our members says studio that he actually photographed full-size cars in so we use that in between his car shots to kind of work on the layout get set up and get everything dialed in uh we set up at about three shows during the year that people can come see the layout at uh the harper college show the palatino which is a big show and then we try to hit the prototype model which meets two down here in st louis we also do the theater great so if you'd like to see this layout in person check out the show schedules around the chicago area and you're going to be in for a treat because this is a beautiful layout the responsible st louis like you all to meet uh dan show tell us a little bit about your success 75 to 290 attendees this year we blew it out of the park and we got about almost 390 so so i think people like what we have to offer um honestly this is a it's an attendee driven event so if the attendees come and they bring the clinics and they bring the vendors come and we get to have this site of customization we uh they're the ones who make it a great show and we center this meet around the models we always have said from davon this is about the models and when you put a bunch of models on a bunch of tables in front of folks social stuff's going to come people are going to want to chat shoot the bull that kind of thing you're going to provide presentations a layout or two lots of door prizes you know and you have a good time and a heck of a selection of exhibitors here you know showing new products selling existing products things like that so we can plan a good show like this next year too yes i think that each rpm is unique in its own way they're all great our business mom lives keep it all in one room everybody be together all the time that way you go to a clinic or not you can talk to an exhibitor whether they are a manufacturer or a historical society or not or you can simply look at a model and the model is driving the stand set and each year we try to improve the event we send out an email and survey and ask people what they like that they didn't like that they see more of them and then we tailor the program for them to try things out each year and see what works and that's how we improve the event over the years really good guys well let's look forward to next year in august if you can come to st louis bring your models and attend the st louis prototype modeler show and after working the show for two days and completing all of my interviews that i needed to finish my work was finished and i had an open house that saturday evening in my studio on the bluff the mississippi river we had a really nice bonfire it was just a really good time john deetson flew his drone around the garden railroad and videotaped some incredible footage of the property on the cliff his system was guided from a cell phone and it showed its view from the air real time giving altitude speed and the knowledge that 16 satellites were helping him fly his craft he shot this beautiful still photo of the house at night with all of us watching as a group with with awe inside the layout room everything ran well i took a few moments to show all the new athern models that i had been uh photographing over the past six weeks and there were a lot of oos and aas of the details and the rainbow of paint schemes that i had in the cases to show off some of the guys hit some golf balls off the cliff with their own style and they had a lot of fun doing this outside the bonfire was glowing with good conversation all around it was it was really cool weather that evening so it was just perfect for the fire joe steinman suggested burning the trestle that's that's uh you know joe steinman he's the gentleman that created the this is nuts video for us which has got the most hits of any video at that point he then started to want to want to light the garden railroad on fire not good but you know what i'll let you watch what happened next because it's all for the love of trains now this is nuts joe joe does this look like a good idea anyway joe look at the the track joe joe really it's out see it's out some rocket motors joe all right i'll car fly go pick out a flat car anyone you want