 Hi, I'm Craig Biskyer, and the June show of What's Neat This Week starts right now. This is What's Neat in Model Rariting with Ken Patterson for June 2016. This month we've got a new guest, John Tyson of Joliet, Illinois, stops by and shares with us a yard tower that he's scratched built from styrene, and he also milled a lot of the parts on this. We also have two photo segments this month, one on a train set experience that I had with a customer, more or less relating a photograph, a model photograph, trying to kind of just tailor make it exactly for what the customer needed. Kind of something you don't think about when you're shooting model contest photos, but it's still made for a very interesting story this month, and I wanted to share it with you on What's Neat. Also we do a photo segment on the cell phone versus the DSLR camera, and kind of compare the two and try to find out how to get the best photographs you can out of your cell phone device. Also this month we do a segment on a lift out section, something really simple with no wires, no hinges, no rail joiners, just something simple and fast using magnets. So that's a really cool segment this month. But first and tool tips, I'm building this structure, and this is a BTS oil structure. It's an oil tank high up on stilts. What I want to talk about this month is glue needles. If you've never used one of these needles, these are made by a company called, they're actually called Touch and Flow Needles, and I know Walthers Stocksman and Walthers Catalog, and there's no better tool for applying glue to a structure and not making a mess all over the parts. If you've never used one of these, you really should check out these glue needles and how these work is. I stick them in, in this case I'm using Pro Weld, and as you pull it out you can see the glue is in the needle, and when I turn it over, the glue flows down to the needle's point. Okay? Then once that happens, that allows me, in this case on this oil tank that I'm building, it's a titchy tank car assembly that comes with a kit, and I've got tape on here just for the sake of the video show so this part doesn't fall apart, and let me actually pull this off and show you how this is done. By using this glue needle, you don't make a mess, you don't get glue all over the part so you have to go back and sand it with really fine sandpaper. So I hold the parts together, and I've got my needle full of glue, and you simply draw it along the part just like this, and the capillary action of the glue allows the glue to flow into the part, and you don't get any mess on the outside area where you don't want the glue to be, and this part will set up just perfect. So check them out if you've never thought about it, these touch and flow needles are something worth checking out, they're very wonderful tools to help make a much cleaner model, so that's this month's tool tip. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got John Tyson from Juliette, Illinois, extraordinary model builder who brought by a yard tower that I really would like him to share with us and explain to us what he's done on this exquisite looking model that we're looking at. John, can you tell us a little bit about what went into building that beautiful model? Sure, well this is a UD tower in Joliet, basically this is scratch built from styrene, and what I did here is basically all these, every wall section is cut on a milling machine, that way I get the perfectly square cuts, perfect joints, I had the windows, I designed photo etch, so these are all etched windows, and then this is all, this is all scratch built from, you know, styrene etched walkways, and then for the paint work this is, this prototype is like a construction block building, mortar joints, yeah, so how I did that is I first painted this like a dark brown, the whole building, and then I mixed up this tannish color, painted it again, and then followed that with a dental scribe, and scribed in all these mortar lines, that way you get a nice tight mortar line without, you know, having to scribe it into the styrene and get an oversized joint. That's a really exquisite looking model, can we turn this around and see this? I see downspout, window air conditioners, electric meter, there's not really any detail that you hadn't thought about on this. You know, it's actually got a full interior, which is not in it right now, but it's got the full interlocking lever system, which is just a big cabinet in this particular building. See a gas meter down there? John, this is some of the most extraordinary modeling I've ever seen, the weathering on the etching, the stairwork is just well done. Thank you so much for sharing this beautiful building with us on What's Neat, and we hope to see some more of your great buildings in the future. Thank you. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm doing a photography shoot today, and this is a simple train set setup, so I'm doing box art for train sets, and this is a diorama that I've built using Easy Track, which is specifically designed to be shot from this direction, and shoot Bachman train set photos like this one, or Athern train set photos. I've done a lot of different Athern train set photos using this diorama, and the one thing about this diorama is it's standardized, where I can take different types of scenery, and it's designed where I can slide the scenery on and off of the diorama and make the scene completely changeable. Now, I want to tell you a story about this diorama and kind of explain to you what happened to me this week working on this project. Now, this diorama, like I said, is designed where I can shoot various types of scenery on it, so here I've got a sliding scene with trees on it, which I would take these trees off and replace it, and I can slide the scenery around on the scene. I can do it with pine trees, I can do it with snow scenes, I can take just, you know, even as far as desert scenes, and just change the diorama to fit the need for the photo shoot. Well, one day, recently, Athern had called up, and I've got an ongoing project where he said, Chris Palomeras asked me to shoot this diorama, except he wanted a shot from left to right. He wanted the train engines on this side and the caboose on this side, and I thought, well, that's really easy. I could do that, but the scene isn't designed to be shot from that direction, so the photograph may be not as good as what I would like it to really come out to be. And this was a project where I was trying to impress some of the other new people that I'm starting to work with at Horizon, so that I could cross into not just trains, but eventually airplanes and cars and the various types of products that they've got in their line. So I'm working with new people at Horizon, along with Chris Palomeras, and I really wanted to impress them, and I felt sort of handicapped by having to use this diorama shot in a way that it was never meant to be photographed. I did take a picture. I'll show you how it did come out. Here's the shot that I did do for them. And it sort of looks okay. I did remake some of the trees just to make it better, but it's not something where you really want to try to impress somebody for the first time with a shot like this. Then I found out how they wanted to use the photograph by talking to the folks in the production department a little bit, and I found out that it was going to be a RC car slash train brochure for slot car sets and for train sets. And we were going to have the top portion of the cover. So here's a mockup using that photograph that I shot of the type of format that I had to work with. Now that I know that I've got a space of this size to work with, now we can do anything we want. We don't have to use this scene. We could take, say, a city scene and set up the train set model that needs to be featured in this case a GT model, or, or we can do a switch yard scene. One of the characteristic shots with beautiful clouds and the engine all focused, the train set lined up, or we could take out a river scene. There's just a multitude of dioramas that I've got ready on the go, where we do a 30 minute photo shoot in full sun and just knock their socks off and actually impress a new client for the first time. And so that's what I did. I plan to do a photo shoot here. And I'm going to probably take out a module off of my layout and just load it out with figurines and try to tell a story in the picture. So that's the plan on this job. Let's see how this one comes out. So after sleeping on it and giving it a lot of thought, I dug out the river diorama to shoot this horizon shot on. And what it is, it's a river module with a BLMA bridge on it that I think the train set will look really nice setup in the scene. Now I don't have any sun today. I've got very little sun. So I'm using 3000 watts of light to help fill all the cavities of darkness in the scene and just try to make up for some of the lack of sun that I've got. I'm shooting about a quarter second exposure and half half second exposure. And as you can see, I put in the scene a little guy, a dog. Really, it's the little boy and the dog and the father that always make for a great model railroad photograph simply because of the element of people. It makes any photograph just pop and come alive. So I think that's what this shot is going to look like all set up. I've shot verticals and horizontals with lots of bleed, just to fit what they may want to use for their cover for this slot car slash train cover. But this is a scene I've used here. Let me show you how the final photograph came out. This is what it looks like. Really happy with the corporate image that this shot portrays. So that's this segment of layout photography on what's neat. I was really excited to get a freelance job where I could just use any diorama that I wanted and just have a little bit of fun with this one. And so far, I think today we've succeeded for this photography segment of what's neat. Chris Palomar is an ather and asked me to do a photograph this week where I'd be working the big boy locomotive, the challenger and a Southern Pacific locomotive into the same photograph. So I've got that whole scene set up. I set it up yesterday and started working on the shoot. Did a test shoot yesterday. And today I'm doing the final photograph for Chris. So let me take you outside and show you the scene and what it looks like. Today's segment is going to be a comparison of a device, the Apple device, the iPhone device. That's what I've got here. I think I've got an iPhone 6 right here. And it's been asked on the internet more than once, can you take great model railroad photographs with your phone? And yesterday I experimented with it just a little bit and I can tell you, yes, you can, but you've got to work within the parameters of what the device will do. And what I mean by that is anything closer than about two inches to this phone falls in soft focus. And because we cannot adjust the focal point of this telephone, it's all simply automatic. I can't really run a photograph through Helicon Focus like I can when I'm using my D2X camera, my Nikon camera that I always use for photographs. Now it's not going to be a comparison as to what takes better pictures because I already know that my Nikon will be superior because it's a device that's designed to do just this as a 12 megapixel camera, the iPhone device camera. I believe this iPhone 6 is about an eight megapixel device. If I read all the literature correctly this morning on the internet. So what I've got here is I've got the ethering scene set up. And since yesterday I've changed out the passenger car for a box car and have it all set up now. So it's exactly the way the corporate customer, the way ethering would like the shot to be. And I'm going to set up the iPhone device in the same location as where I've got my camera set up where I've shot the photograph from. And if you look here, I've got another tripod and I went to be an H photography online and I picked up this little mount so that I can mount the cell phone to a tripod and get a perfectly still photograph. So let me go ahead and set up the camera here and let's go ahead and test this iPhone device. And let me show you how to go about taking a photograph with it. Now with my Nikon I can get these cars way close to the lens, all in focus. Plus I can use Helicon focus and a photo stacking program and do that on the computer. I can't use Helicon focus with the cell phone. So what I'm going to do is set up the photograph with the cell phone so that I am only going to use the parameters of focus that I know I have. And that's anything from two to two and a half inches and to infinity that will be in focus using this iPhone device. Very hard to see the screen out here. In fact it's almost impossible. I can see enough to set up camera. And we are ready to shoot. Now if I set the device up where the camera is in the lower portion of the device the photographs will come out upside down. I tried that yesterday. But if I set up the camera where it's high like this in relation to what I want to take it'll give me a different perspective than my Nikon the way I had the lens set just about an inch above the diorama's base. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to shoot the photograph upside down on purpose and then reverse it into the computer. You simply mount this with a small clamp and now we've got a steady platform to which we can shoot the photograph. I'm looking at the viewfinder again it's very difficult to see this in the sunlight and I'm setting it up so that what we'll do is we'll set up the same photograph I shot with the Nikon camera to the best that I can and then crop the photograph in Photoshop to match so I'm set up now and now I'm going to take the shot now I'm going to hand hold the device and just see what kind of photograph I can get by doing it that way simply because we have so much more control over location placement. Now this isn't going to match the photograph that I just did for athern but it'll be a very interesting perspective to look at it from so I'm going to take this shot and now let me show you exactly how this shot came out. This should be soft on the automobiles up close in front as you can see but it is captures the essence of the photograph so I would say yes this is a very capable device for shooting photos. Now let's look at both photographs. Let's look at the shot that I did using the Nikon camera so here's the finished athern photograph. I've got the passenger car removed out of the scene from the initial shot that I did on the computer screen yesterday and I've added a building to kind of walk a little bit of this other Pacific soft ray cars and everything else is set up in a position and well lit and then I've run it through Helicon Focus so everything is completely in focus from the automobile all the way to the rear of the shot and then we look at the photograph that we shot with the Apple device an 8 megapixel camera very good lens and it too takes a pretty decent model railroad photograph. I wouldn't want to depend on it commercially for doing my jobs because I'm so used to using the Nikon and I know exactly what I want and how to make it do what it is I want to do plus I have the ability to adjust the focus and the depth of field the focus plane in the shot in order to use Helicon Focus it's a very helpful thing that I can't do with the Apple phone but at the same time there's plenty of programs that you can get as app devices for editing software for these photographs so you know there's multiple ways to still get a great model railroad photograph using one of these Apple devices so if you've got one don't shy away from it it's a great way to start shooting and sharing your work with model railroad hobbyist magazine especially the is it real section these phones will take great photographs so that's this segment of what's neat photography pretty cool stuff going on for this segment of layout construction for what's neat I built this HON3 layout that measures about 12 feet by 5 feet and I built it to do outdoor run buys of Blackstone models I think that's always the best way to present the model is out in real sunlight for run buys and there's nothing that sells products better and in fact this layout was a subject of a shelf layout video that I did for my website for kenpatterson.com where I showed how to build a shelf layout that sits in a layout room and then I also showed how to work that layout into this 12 by 5 layout which I've got another section here that can also be put on the wall they're both interchangeable so that I can have variety in my outdoor run buys so I've got this great layout but I've never known exactly what to do with it when I'm not using it and the last place I wanted to put this one was up in the garage where it would just get covered with dust and essentially have to you know be replenished and redone every couple of months so I'm keeping this one in the basement down here this is the old section where I used to have my bluff and when I took out the bluff section of my layout it opened up this great space where this 12 foot by 5 foot layout fits perfectly so I can keep it nice, keep it fresh and then haul it outside any time I need to do a videography shoot or a still photo shoot using this as a prop but now I'd like to work this into my home layout. My home layout is 153 feet that runs around the perimeter of my studio and with this sitting on the center table here in this area it would be very cool if I could build a lift out section for this layout to be able to connect it to my home layout and so that's the subject of this what's neat layout construction tip is how I'm going to go about doing that and I've got a couple of goals in this where I want this to be the most simple lift out section that I've ever made no hinges, no rail joiners and no wires I just simply want to lift out an arc, a curved piece of wood and the way I've figured this out I've got this track which is curved at about 24 inches, 25 inches radius and that will match up the curvature of the diorama layout with my layout where I can, you know, have this track just curve right into the main line or into a siding off of my layout and get the two to match up just right but again the key is having a lift out section that's functional now I've taken a turn out here a number 6 shin hair turn out and I cut off the end here so I can match my 26 inch radius to come off of this layout on to what I believe is going to be a piece of plywood I've taken this piece of plywood and what I did was I took 3 quarter inch plywood and I drew an arc on it about a 2 inch distance from the center line of the track to the outside of the plywood so if a car flipped over it wouldn't completely fall off and then I cut this out with a jigsaw so that what I end up with is a piece of wood which I will stain and polyurethane to seal so that it will be a complete finish and what I want to do is I want to take magnets there are these super magnets where I'm planning on sticking a few magnets into the bottom of the board and a couple magnets into the diorama I might have to build a 3 quarter inch piece of wood into the diorama as a base I know I'm going to have to build off the foam we're going to go through all of that as the process goes on but let's see how this turns out again a simple lift out of the wood joiners just pops up with the magnets gets out of the way so you can walk through here, get in and out and if you want to put it back boom and it's got to match up every time so let's see what happens on this project next I sanded the curved section of plywood smooth with an electric sander venting the dust into a dust fact so that the dust would not get on my layout I tested the pull strength of the magnets using needle nose pliers so I could understand this in my mind and see what it was up against I then drew circles on the lift out section tracing around the placement of the magnets 4 on each end of the lift out piece I also cut a plywood piece that matched the lift out ends perfectly this will act as a base in the foam for the lift out to sit atop and attach I drilled holes through the lift out section and the base to act as a reference point to center the magnets to match each other using a drill press and a drill bit that matched the diameter and size of the magnets I made sure the depth was gauged so I very carefully lowered the drill bit locked it into position before I proceeded to drill the holes I then drilled the holes to accept the magnets in the lift out section and the base pieces a total of 16 holes had to be drilled turning my attention to the placement of the lift out section to span between the layout sections I carefully cut away the foam to match the shape of the curved plywood's ends on both sides the permanent layout section and the 12 by 5 stand alone layout section both of these areas had to be carved out to fit these base pieces it was very important to carve the base ends to the depth perfect as to match the rails height for a smooth transition to track work for the trains to run across I wet the area where the base sections would be glued with gorilla glue this glue is activated by the water and will expand filling any gaps in the foam and attaching the base pieces permanently I did this on both ends allowing this to sit and cure under heavy weights for about an hour I stained the curved section with red oak stain to match the finish of my entire layout room I sealed this with 3 coats of polyurethane giving a high gloss finish to the top and the bottom of the lift out section this ensures that it will be sealed and it will never warp I mixed together some 5 minute epoxy and placed this into the holes drilled out to the depth of the magnets I then placed all 4 magnets into this glue working my way across I also put 5 minute epoxy into the holes that were drilled into the base sections I then placed a magnet in each hole careful getting the polarity right as we don't want the lift out section to levitate I repeated this process on both ends of the lift out section allowing this glue to sit up for about an hour now that the magnets were glued in place I tested the lift out section and the magnets worked providing a solid base to which we will lay track so far so good it goes in and lifts out smooth having to fill in the road bed to make a smooth transition between the turn out and lift out section I built a dam out of styrene which I will then fill with gorilla glue and wet this thinking that this would expand and create a good surface to lay track on when the gorilla glue cured it created a very solid base which I cut flush with a saw ensuring level and smooth track work I sealed this area with latex paint then I soldered together two sections of microengineering flex track this is about 5 feet long and I soldered it before I curved it so that I could match it onto the center of the lift out section the fact that microengineering track holds its shape was very helpful when matching the curve to join the layout on both ends I soldered the turn out and the curve track sections to ensure good electrical flow the track on the foam area was glued with liquid nails while the track on the wood lift out section this was glued in place with clear silicone caulk I placed steel weights on this track work to hold it all in a position for about 6 hours until the caulk and liquid nails cured now it was time to cut the track on both ends with a dremel cut off wheel I allowed the rails on the lift out section to hang over about a 16th of an inch this would ensure a straight clean lift up I created electrical contacts for the lift out section by cutting 1 30 second by 1 quarter inch brass stock about 1 inch long I cut two pieces I ran power feet wires through the plywood to the rails these wires were soldered in place on each rail I soldered the other end of the power wires to each piece of brass stock under the lift out section these brass contacts will be sunk into the plywood carved out into channels and glued in place with wather's goo this will ensure a smooth flush fit I also made brass contacts to fit flush for the base sections where the lift out section would fit making sure that the contacts matched and everything lined up these brass contacts received their electrical pickup through the wires soldered to the rails on the approach track as these tracks will always be powered these contacts too were glued into place with wather's goo I used an electrical meter confirming that the lift out section in fact did have good electricity and so far everything tested out positive I tested the lift out section lifting it out and then putting it back in a couple of times to ensure a perfect smooth fit before ballasting and finishing the scenery around the area after ballasting the track and finishing the scenery around the approaches it was finally time to test run my first train across the new lift out section after the train clears I could lift out the section with no wires, no rail joiners no problems well this is success a very simple lift out section that's very functional so that's this segment of layout construction for what's neat