 Hi I'm Alan Pollock and June What's Neat starts right now. This is What's Neat for June 2017. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month George Bogatek stops by to show us his tricked out 3985 Challenger locomotive complete with sound in the boiler and an array of servicing lights all around the model just like the prototype. For layout construction I present an update on the progress of my BTS log mill facility showing how I built the bench work to be functional and have a furniture-like appearance. For photography this month we shoot a model photo using real fire to light the scene with some pretty dramatic results. Matt Herman from ESU Loak Sound came by the studio to explain in great detail how no two prime movers sound the same from cylinder count to motor block size along with all the various other mechanics built into a locomotive and how that affects the way that they sound while operating. Matt explains how Loak Sound captures this sound for our model locomotives. For scenery construction we carve a scene in foam to include the correct track profile which is dictated of course by water runoff. We do this real time in just a few minutes showing the process and the tools and just how easy this is. Now if you like S-scale narrow gauge this past April St. Louis was the place to be. 32nd annual SN3 symposium was held at the airport Marriott Hotel. The show included many dealers and vendors specializing in SN3 products. The display layouts in the ballroom were well lit and very detailed like the rock ridge layout display complete with beautiful bench work and very realistic sound. There were a lot of S-scale brass locomotives available for purchase along with educational clinics on all aspects of the hobby. There were layout tours of some of the most beautiful home layouts in the St. Louis area and the contest room which was a show unto itself had master craftsmen structures of all types covering the tables in the entire room. Next year's show will be held in Dallas, Texas April 5th through 7th 2018. Visit their website www.2018SN3Symposium.com for more information on this and with that let's continue on with the rest of June's What's Neat. This photography segment of What's Neat again you're asking yourself maybe what's Ken Patterson doing at two o'clock in the morning and I can tell you tonight I'm shooting a train set for Athern the first responder train set which is my 45th box art shot that I've done for train sets for many manufacturers over the years but what I'm doing tonight is a special effects shot which may lend itself well if you're looking to do a photo contest and Treen you want to do something a little special and tonight's photo involves fire and what I'm doing is I'm shooting the first responder train set with all of my mountains set up in the background and then I'm taking this this stick with fire and I'm literally waving it in the background of all the mountains and I'm waving it behind the locomotive to light the scene I'm also using a flashlight to light the scene and I'm shooting this in complete darkness I've got all the home lights in the back of the house turned off for this photo shoot and I'm doing about a two minute long exposure with DCC hooked up to the tracks so that we can have the headlights lit and so after all of that running around with fire behind the mountains and not setting the foam on fire I can show you the result that we got from this photo shoot something kind of interesting a little bit of flair a little excitement just something different for the first responder train set photo that we're doing for atherton tonight so that's his quick photography segment on what's neat videos man and I still can't get this profile right man what am I missing man I don't want you to like the track profile yeah it's yeah it just looks like it's a toy but your stuff looks real what am I missing I think that's been in our videos um let's do something let's just make a quick track track profile on this piece of foam or let's go get another piece and let's just real quick carve it out as if it's a final finished scene the first thing you want to think about really and what I think about when I'm building a scene like this ad is you've got to imagine where the water is going to go and you want the track to be the highest point within an area of about nine to 12 feet on either side and these track specific designs are in the railroad prototype standard but just imagine yourself for a minute if it's raining and where's the water going to go a lot of times when I pour resin creeks I'll fill the creek with water so I can anticipate the flow of the resin before I pour it it really helps a lot in doing rivers but just imagine where the water is going to go and then carve our scenery down from there so you don't require a cork to achieve this no cork it's all about the tools and it's specifically about the type of tools you use this rasp is one of the most valuable tools on either side of the track for doing track profile so let's grab a sheet of foam and let's just carve up something real quick and and see if we can make some track look good all right all right the first thing I like to do ed is once you decide where your track is going to go I like to draw a line on either side of the track with a marker so it'll allow me to know where or not to carve so the track's got a flat base so I've got this bent rasp ed and it works great for carving out the track profiles on both sides of the track and that's what we're going to do right now it's imagining now where the water is going to go so effectively I've got the profiles cut this is from the wood smith store is that the name of the place woodcraft woodcraft store that's where I found the bent rasp I've never seen these anywhere else you might be able to find them online but now what we want to do you want to carve a creek in here sure let's and what we'll do is we'll take out the surrounding scenery now mind you if you were doing mountainous terrain you would still have the water run off immediately on either side of the track and then your scenery would go up from there but we're probably going to carve this down as a flat field on either side okay run a drainage dish through here real quick so let's pull out the hot foam cutter and start cutting out our drainage dish so let's put in a creek so we'll run through right here and we'll cut out the uh I got a hot foam cutter here and we'll use that real quick to cut out we'll just cut out a quick little area here where there'd be a culvert you can put in a concrete culvert or wooden railroad tie culvert here see how all this machine does is it speeds up the cut time and it squares the edges but now you can take a long saw and cut out the main part of your creek yeah that's what we're gonna do this is a pruning saw blade it is the best most rapid clean cutting tool trestle or something you can just cut that out sure or a small bridge but you're going to we're going to do a culvert we could do either way right now we could drop in a quick bridge throw in some waffers trestle banks or drop in a piece of pipe or some sodie straws yeah a pipe is a little more unusual I think next step is to seal everything in latex paint so that visually you can see the topography because of pink it makes it really hard to see yeah paint is not a nice latex brown like a shirt color brown let's get let's paint right before I paint it we're going to smooth it down with this sure farm planer because it'll help us save paint because we really don't need a lot of topography here once it's covered up with fake fur now that gives you a good idea of how your scene is going to look yeah it's going to start to look like the correct topography right so we've got our track I usually glue track down with liquid nail but right now we're going to let the paint since it's wet and glue down the dirt and actually we're going to use some static grass too because it's wet it'll all stick so we're going to let the dirt are the paint paint itself be the glue tonight awesome because that way we could do this demonstration in less than 15 minutes do you ever ever paint your track first before you glue it down see that I've done that on the garden railroad I did that on the midwest valley monitors layout but what I also like to do is come back with a paint brush and paint white ties right tie and just get a little variation in the color of ties it's very noticeable when the scene's finished but for what we're doing tonight that's in some time right let's just cover up the scene with a little bit of dirt we'll put some static grass on this this dirt would get glued in the place with the paint in effect we'll dump the excess right off now you're just gonna have to imagine that the track is glued down with liquid nail for this demonstration it's not going to be because of the essence of time now this will still be moist enough to get the static grass to stick now we're going to spray some water on top of the dirt you know how we just put down woodland scenic ground foam that would be easy yeah now normally we would just spray this woodland scenic cement and let the dirt set up the way it is but tonight we're going to let the paint glue it so let's dump off the excess our scene is scenic now it's all stuck to the paint next is ballast the key to ballast isn't so much fine ballast is important but the key to ballast is a type of brush that you use to spread the ballast the best brush is a round brush like this because it allows just the tip of the brush to touch the ballast which gives you a lot more just spreading it smooth between the ties let the ballast fall where the gravity takes it because we've carved the topography with that in mind seems like a lot of ballast it is it really is we'll spread this with the paint brush and spread the extra right off the edge so ballast away from the rails if it's sticking on the sides of the rails it looks really unproven typical i guess i like to have the tops of all the ties showing okay anyway okay and i got the woodland scenic scenic cement you guys got everything down just right let's wet it and glue it in place and we're going to use a lot of glue on this ballast it's pretty thick we're also going to wet the dirt so the static grass will stick in this glue and stand straight up and we'll have a scene built in the last 15 minutes to use fake fur this would be the time to glue down your fake fur coat we're using static grass today i've got some green in the gun here the gun is on all you simply want to do is put the alligator clip on the surface that'll create your current so the grass will stand straight up once we apply it and the grass will start coming out here and stand straight up got the grass is standing up coming various things to this um the last thing we want to do is drop in some rocks here put a culvert underneath for the creek yeah we did ram a pipe we'll just spread out some rocks different sizes and work the vegetation out on both sides of the gravel about where the creek would be before you pour your resin base if you were pouring the resin one in here put some boulders in here on the side a little rip wrap just kind of mix it up a little bit you know put some woodland scenic scenic cement on that and let that set up hard and other than putting plywood sides on your diorama and trees and other things i'd say you've got yourself a real quick profile which is kind of what you were inquiring about how do we carve down the profile real quick with what tools did we use a lot better than just a flat piece of four by plywood so good question yeah it was it was just natural that you asked the question and hopefully maybe we've got a good video out of this cool but thank you for asking and in the event this did turn out to be a video that's this segment on scenery on what's neat my name is Ron Perry and you're watching Ken Patterson's What's Neat there's some nice voss for my vines for this segment of What's Neat i've got George Bogatuck from Durango Colorado and he just customized a 3985 challenger that he's going to share with us today with lights two sets of speakers the sound actually comes out of the boiler on this one George tell us about this magnificent model we're looking at okay and what i did was with the new tsunami too i had to install this into my challenger my personal little vice is the up passenger set so i had to have this one done up properly so with the tsunami too and six lighting functions it allowed me to light this thing up properly so what we have is we have the headlights we have the marker lights are the class lights up front we have the number boards lit up and we have the side running lights along the inside we have a cab light on the interior and a red flashing emergency on the back of the the tender one of the cool things that the tsunami too allows me to do is to dim lights to be constant dim when they're on and i can adjust the brilliance for how bright or dim the light is and so that allowed me to do the number boards on the front at the proper brilliance and the marker lights and the running lights along the side of the locomotive at different brillances so that it appears more realistic than just simply having to play with resistor values to make that work now what i did was i installed the decoder actually right here behind the backhead up in the front of the locomotive on the locomotive side and i've got a soundtracks mini cube up under this exhaust stack and then i've got a soundtracks 28 by 40 millimeter speaker in the tender so that it gives a good range of sound but also doesn't seem like the sound is coming from the tender so when the locomotive passes you you hear the sound from the locomotive and not from the tender and with the tsunami too we've got a lot of cool features that you can customize the decoder for operation so we've got an articulated exhaust chuff with the wheels slip going in and out of sync with each other we've got an oil burning sound with an atomizer running in the background that you can hear we've got dual steam dynamos running we've got a nonlifting type injector and many many more customized sounds in the tsunami too that helped me recreate this model more more accurately man the lights are beautiful on it it sounds fantastic george thanks a lot for sharing this masterpiece with us on what's neat thank you again this layout construction segment of what's neat i want to give you an update on my bts log mill complex project that i have been working on i started the process of building the bts log mill by figuring the space required for all of the buildings and then i started placing track around this with function operation and a minimum radius of 27 inches in mind i drew lines along the edges of the track to mark the tracks placement onto the foam i then started stacking or layering two-inch sheets of foam by gluing them together with a foam pro adhesive after pressing the top layer of foam into the glue evenly all around i placed an assortment of weights and boards on top of this for about 30 minutes until the glue cured i then cut the new layer of foam to match the top layer and remove this which then sort of determined the size of the diorama i repeated this process gluing a third layer of foam into place making the modular section about six inches thick i cut around the edges with a pull saw removing the excess foam revealing the size and the overall look of the scene to hold the foam module i built bench work from two by fours measuring from the floor to the point of the rails height every leg had to be built to a different length because i wasn't going to use leg levelers on this project now this different length had to be compensated for you know to compensate for the uneven concrete floor ensuring a level surface for the entire modular diorama i attached these two-way locking wheels i found at the home depot it's very important not only to be able to lock the wheels roll but also to lock the pivot locking this pivot point ensures the modules won't wiggle from side to side on the bearings ensuring solid and tight bench work when complete i rounded all the corners on the wood bench work with a one-half inch router bit ensuring a smooth edge i then sanded the woodwork with 120 grit smooth sandpaper ensuring every surface that your hands come into contact with will feel smooth i then applied red oak stain and three coats of polyurethane to finish the bench work into a furniture-like appearance it was now time to put all the pieces together i rolled the bench work into position close to the bridge module that will connect with the sawmill diorama now if i did all my measuring correctly the rails height will match perfectly on both scenes as they go together i slid the sawmill diorama on top of the bench work and put it into place i carefully positioned the foam even and square to the bench work matching marks that i had already drawn underneath the foam ensuring an exact placement on top of the smooth bench work when i rolled the scene into position it matched the height of the adjoining module perfectly i love it when a plan goes together like this now to hold the foam from sliding on the top of the smooth bench work i drilled a few holes underneath the bottom of the wood at a 45 degree angle countersunk and then i put in three inch screws screwing these screws up into the foam ensuring that things won't slide sideways at all but yet i can take them out easily when i need to remove things and take things outside i also attached brass plum box to each end of the bench work these will point to an x on the floor this will ensure that when the scenes are taken outside for photography and video and then they are brought back in they can be placed in their exact locations matching the plum bob's point to the center x on the floor which will guarantee rail alignment when everything is reassembled and that's a quick update on the progress of the log mill project that i've been working on simply the bench work was a big hurdle to get over but now it will be time to start laying track and working on the scenery and working on the edges of the foam diorama finishing things off with woodwork and we'll do follow-ups on future what's needs so that's this layout construction segment for what's neat Ken as we were talking earlier we've done a lot of prime movers for our for our product line and there's a reason why we've done so many because there's a lot of differences in prime mover we've talked a little bit about education and the mission that i'm on to to educate and part of that is explaining why we've done so many prime movers every serial number of every locomotive if you could have five st 40 dash twos from serial number to serial number to serial number they will all sound different there's going to be sometimes they have a new turbo put into them sometimes they have different air compressors this low idle high idle you know st 40 dash twos there were 3 000 of them made so they were made over many many years so advancements happened you had dynamic range or extended range dynamics you had different types of fans on them so there was a lot of differences so that's just one engine so let me explain as we go down through all these beautiful engines behind us why we've created some of the prime movers that we have and and what we've got available so the first is just a an athern gp 38 dash two this is a 16 cylinder 645 e this is a non-turbo locomotive we've because so many differences do exist between prime movers and engine to engine we've actually got three or four of those recorded now so we have some variation so if you bought three gp 38 dash twos and they all came with low sound you could actually upload the two other differences within that locomotive because they're programmable decoder we don't just have a gp or a i'm sorry a 645 turbo and a 645 non-turbo we have about every cylinder and every block variation that came available which means this is a 16 cylinder 645 e the next one is a 12 cylinder 645 e we're working on an 8 cylinder 645 e you know there's lots of variation this is a gp 15 we've recorded multiple gp 15 so you have some variation just in that model but we've also done multiple sw 1500s they have a little bit different stacks something more like this one over here but you know they're still the 645 e prime movers so they have a similar sound but just enough to be different so that you have those subtleties so you can run multiple unit lash ups and have that that distinguishability in between them the next is a 567 this is a 16 cylinder 567 we have now recorded i believe almost every 567 block available again this is a 16 cylinder but there were 16 cylinder a's and b's and c's and b c's and we've done just about every one we've done with exhaust silencers without we've done you know multiple stack variations this is a 12 cylinder 567 this is a 6 cylinder 567 last week i recorded an 8 cylinder 567 and you know those are there's all those variations in between now when we get to the 16 again there's lots of variations there's even times where in both the 12 and the 16s they've replaced the power assemblies with 645 power assemblies we've recorded those two we've even got different exhaust we've got two two exhausts for power assemblies using 645 and we've got four exhausts for things like gp 16s which there was programs out in hundreds and hundreds of engines existed that way sw 1200s same thing they had 12 cylinder 645 power assemblies put in there's lots and lots of variation and that's just the 567s here's another variation of a 567 this is a 567 d3 this would happen to be a gp 30 they're also good for sd 24s and gp 35s if you go back to the the d2s and and before we recorded a gp 20 gp 20 has a little bit different idle speed so even though it's a 567 turbo not all 567 turbos are the same so again more variation here's a couple of alcoes this is a 16 cylinder 251 we've recorded c engines we've recorded d engines we've recorded the 12 cylinder 251 b's and multiples of them we have again different governors we've got different startups in the 16 cylinder versions we've done air start we've done electric start we've done multiples of all of those prime movers as well we've done c420s m420s rs 11s rs 18s all 12 cylinder 251s but they all sound different and we want those variations in between we've done 244s we've done eight cylinder 251s we've done six cylinder 251s every one of them has these its own subtleties its own character and we want that on the layout if not you just have a not me and it gets boring because everything starts to sound the same this is a new engine this is a sd 39 we there's this is the number 40 is about the only sd 39 that still exists and runs i've just recorded that exact engine so that's a 12 cylinder 645 with a turbo the next one is a 16 cylinder 645 with a turbo that's that sd 40 dash two that we just talked about we've also done a 20 cylinder 645 with a turbo in many of these we've done multiples of them we've done a couple we've done a gp 39 dash two and we've done an sd 39 dash two both 12 60 or 12 cylinders 645 e 3s we've done about five sd 40 dash twos high idols low idols extended range dynamics normal dynamics without dynamics dash twos dash threes with the electronics they make things happen at a different pace a different rate your idling is a little bit different 45 45 dash twos 45 dash twos there's lots and lots of variation we just want to make sure that everything doesn't sound the same because that's that fourth dimension that nobody really thinks about they're always worried about the detail on the outside the beautiful streets and the houses and the trees and whether it's got the right grab irons or not whether it's got the right lift rings in the right places well it's time to super detail that sound inside as well and that's what we're after so why don't we hear some of them run why don't we take some out and uh you know we'll go and switch in industry