 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. And by Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at bachmentrains.com and by Roka Prototype Models. We make it real. Check out their website at www.rocamodels.com. And thank you for helping us support the best hobby in the world. This is What's Neat from March 2023. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we've got a great show in that it is part two of the series that we are running on layout construction. Last month you watched us build the shelf layout that will eventually get worked into a very larger sized layout and be interchangeable with multiple types of different shelf layouts. This month we build some buildings and further work on the project. It's a great segment for What's Neat. Also this month Matt Stern from Bachman Industries comes over on Skype and shares with us all the latest new products that they're offering this year for 2023. It's really exciting that Via locomotive is absolutely beautiful. Be sure to check out the What's Neat This Week video podcast that we shoot every Saturday night. Showing what's new in our hobby, what's great, the special guests, a regular podcast crew, keeping you updated on this, the best hobby in the world. And so with that, let's continue on with the rest of this March 2023 What's Neat. Hello, this is Michael Gross and you're watching What's Neat with Ken Patterson. Here's an example of a new way that I like to add strength to all the dioramas that I do. I've got these pieces of wood that I've run through the band song. I've got the router set up with a fence, fence is centered so that I can router a groove center of a piece of foam, blocks of wood. As you're gonna see in this upcoming clip, I'm not sure that you'll be able to watch where I'm actually routering the diorama itself to insert these blocks of wood into a nice router groove, which then I'll use as a platform to staple the plywood sides onto and with this piece of wood being glued in with gorilla glue, it's gonna add a great deal of strength through the length of the diorama where when you attach the plywood, it's not gonna flex. It's gonna be a very strong diorama. So that's, I wanted to set you up for the next coming clip of routering so you'd understand where I'm going with this. This is a great way now and I do it for all of my dioramas from now on, whether they're two inches thick or six inches thick or 15 inches thick. I've done some big dioramas this way and it really works. I took some one by fours and I ran them through the bandsaw and then I ran them through the circular saw and cut them up into small sections. And what I'm gonna do with these is I'm gonna wet these with water. I'm gonna put gorilla glue on, that polyurethane glue that is, the effect is started from the water reaction that it receives. And then these pieces of wood are gonna get pushed into the one inch and are into the two inch foam just like this. It'll be nice and flush. And as the glue sets up, they'll be permanent in here. And what this'll do is give me a surface to attach the plywood to. So the outside surrounding frame that's gonna keep this diorama from flexing will be permanently attached with staples to this wood. This is the way I prefer to do all of my dioramas. It works out very well and strength and the sides will never pull off. I'm gonna stain the wood sides that you see right here with some red oak that'll match the decor of the room and make everything look very nice. So I'm gonna paint this one before the wood's attached to the diorama. It'll be a much cleaner process that way. I'll be able to finish the wood completely with polyurethane and have these things looking just perfect before we attach them. Now what I'm doing is I'm putting in the wood that's going to help us attach our plywood sides to the diorama. And what I'm doing is I'm putting this polyurethane glue, this gorilla glue onto the little pieces of wood that are gonna go inside here. And I'm wetting everything. I'm spraying water in the groove and I'm putting water in the little pieces of wood or soaking in a bowl of water. So everything's wet because it's the water that causes this glue to react and get hard. It'll start to foam, it'll expand, it'll fill all the grooves behind the wood and then it'll securely hold these little blocks of wood in. They'll never come out and that's what we're gonna staple our wooden framing sides on that dress up the module and use it a finished appearance, just like that. After you get all the glue in, you've got to go back as it's starting to set up and just push the blocks of wood in with your fingers and just make sure that the expansion's not pushing the wood back out because it'll do that to a couple of them if you're not paying attention. And you've got to stay on top of this for the first 15 minutes while this chemical's setting up, while this gorilla glue is starting to cure with the water. The water is what causes this mixture of glue and water to react with each other and the polyurethane starts to foam and expand and that's what it's doing right now. And this is all gonna be set up in less than 30 minutes. So that's kind of what's going on right now. I'm running a Stanley Sureform planer along the edges to get out the foam that has expanded. Two or three coats of polyurethane on the side of the wood to seal it and give it that beautiful shine, that beautiful finish of a piece of furniture and this is gonna look really nice here in about 25 or 30 minutes. Figure about two hours to three hours between dry time. So this is a complete six to eight hour project just finishing off the sides and making them look nice. But it's well worth the time because you're gonna spend years looking at this. So you wanna do all this work now. Now that we've got our plywood done, let me show you how we're gonna put this on. First, I wanna make sure the diorama is on a completely flat and level surface which I've got it on these nice pieces of wood here. Here's the piece of wood that we've got cut out. I've got it matched up to the side of the diorama. Test fit, everything looks good. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come along here with some water now and I'm gonna wet everything all the wood here. And then I'm gonna come through with a row of Gorilla Glue, nice line of Gorilla Glue all the way along the moisture laden wood here. I just wanna put enough on because this is gonna expand and ooze. I just wanna put on a little line, not too much so it doesn't come through the edges, just like that. I'm using half inch crown staples with my electric stapler to attach everything. And this is really straightforward and very easy. It's just a matter of getting it right because you don't get a second chance to go back and do this part over if you mess up. Got everything lined up here just right. Now I'll go back and cover up these staples. Usually you would put the staples in before you finish the wood, but in this case I didn't wanna mess up the edge of the scenery with stain. So I'm doing this sort of backwards. These crown staples don't leave that big of a footprint. So it's relatively easy to come back with a pointed chisel, hammer them in a little deeper and then cover them up with wood pipe. And so I'm gonna do this all the way around and then it'll finish up this diorama other than the buildings and the top scenery and things like that. So I've installed the module now after we put in the track and got everything painted so I could test everything and make sure it works before I put in the blocks. One thing I don't like particularly about the area up here is because it's so high up and where the lighting is gonna be here, it's kind of dark. So what I'm thinking about doing is putting in a valance. So what I wanna do is build a valance that's gonna be at an angle on the wall, not straight up and down but sort of at an angle and it'll have a light behind it, one of those nice rope lights. I'll experiment with LEDs down the road but right now I've got some really cool incandescent rope light that I cut and made eight feet long. So here's what that rope light looks like and I've got a piece of plywood here that I've cut and I've got notched out the angle of where the eye beam of the basement is going to go. And my plan is to cut some triangles and angle this like this at an angle on the wall, on the ceiling and attach it to the ceiling tiles with the small triangles. So I'll stain it, I'll paint it white on one side, stain it dark on the other and put the rope light attached to it and this should work out as a very functional eight foot long valance for the little area up there that we've modeled. And here's how that valance came out after it was stained and I've attached it to the ceiling using the triangles by simply drawing drywall screws right up into the girders that are holding up the drop ceiling. So I didn't use the rope lights, I actually took them out, they weren't bright enough to do much, I need to get some LED rope lights and I can fish them through the holes here. It's painted white on the back just like I said and I did add a fluorescent shop light right up here at the top which will give a lot of light onto the scene. But yet there's no light in your eyes when you're standing up on a stool and you're at the elevated height of where this diorama is. So far I'm really happy with the valance and the way this is coming out, just the way it's working. I might continue that valance all the way across the room as I take down pictures and add another shelf layout that would continue on with a mine at some point that would continue right off the back of the one that we're building right now. Now let's talk about some of the structures that I'd like to put onto this diorama. You know when you get up to a top location on top of the hill, you're gonna need a water tank because your locomotives are gonna be thirsty. So I bought this BTS small water tank and I'll tell you what, 15 minutes so far to build it, it's a lot easier than scratch building a trestle. Really simple. This kit will go together in about three hours. The only time that's real necessary is the time that it took to bend the outside wood. I had to soak it in water, make it wet and then wrap it around the core disks that come with the kit. Easy enough, went together real nice. Once it's stained, I'll put it in the position next to the engine house which is what I wanna talk about. I might put a train station up on the diorama right here at the top of the hill and an excuse for having some industry so I'll place the drop off cars with our tracks we've got laid here. But something else I really wanted to do was build this engine house. So let's discuss next this BTS engine house on the video and how that went together. For this segment of video, I wanna discuss the McCabe engine house from BTS Models. Now this is a laser cut single stall engine house kit and what I'm doing on this project is just like I start all of my laser cut kits, I start by pre-coloring all of the parts. So here I've got the parts that are on the exterior painted dark so I can use the rubber cement trick and make whatever color I paint them show as the darkness, the dark underwood weathering shows through as we paint the paint peel off. The other parts are all stained that's the outside walls and the roof parts. I always pre-color all of the pieces before I put it together. One additional thing I've done is I've got my diorama laid out here that I wanna put this engine house on and I took a piece of plexiglass and I cut out a base for the structure so it'll have a solid single structure holding it all together between the workshop and the main engine house. So I'll take my plexiglass base and I'll lay it in the bottom and I've got my engine house floor all put together already. And so all I've gotta do is simply assemble the outside walls and start to put in the windows and color treat everything. And this kit should go very quick. If it's anything like the other two stall narrow gauge roundhouse I just got them building. This thing should go together really quick. I mean, these laser cuts these days literally fall together like puzzles. It's just a matter of color treatment, weathering and the finished product. And you can have one of these things built in under two weeks. So let me show you how this project carries on. Right now I'm cutting out the windows on the single stall engine house and I'm gonna glue those to the side of the building around where the window frames would go. The single stall engine house went together very quickly. I mean, this is literally like one of those puzzles that you buy at the store in a wooden puzzle. It just falls together. So so far so good on this. I built the outside walls, the plexiglass base. Everything sets into the diorama really nice. And the next thing I'm gonna do is cut the wood joists for the roof and start assembling the roof. So that'll go very quickly. It should fall together the next 20 minutes. And it won't be long that we'll be ready to start painting this building. Now I'm working on the roof on the engine house. And again, this is falling together like a puzzle. But the one helpful tip that I'm gonna bring up here is when I'm applying the glue, I've got the glue on this little metal weight right here, a blotch of glue that I just dump out of the bottle. And I use a dental pick to apply the glue to the model in the gaps and in this case in the roof gaps where the pieces are gonna fit. And by doing it this way, you get just enough glue to hold the piece in place without making a great big mess with all the glue. And this thing again, I keep saying this over and over again. I know that sounds redundant. But this thing is falling together like a puzzle. I'm using these blocks of steel that I've got. I've got a lot of pieces of steel I picked up at a garage sale one time. And I'm using these steel blocks to help square the roof pieces as they go on just to make sure that the pieces are just right. But again, the roof is going together real nice right now. Everything is just falling together on this kit so far. Now that I've got the main components of the single stall engine house built, it's time to paint this thing white. Now I've painted it dark first so that when I apply rubber cement to this and they put white paint on it and scrape it off, it'll give the effect of the dark weathered wood effect. So the first step in doing that, what I need to do, and this is probably the scariest part for any of us to get over. And that's after we've spent all of this time building this, we're now gonna absolutely cover this thing with rubber cement. I mean, we're gonna liberally apply this glue to the structure with the brush, the applicating brush that comes with it. And I wanna put it all over this thing very heavy. It'll dry thin, it'll thin out as it dries. So what looks heavy now will go flat. And then we'll rub it off after it's painted white. So this is what I need to do. The whole building now is just simply liberally just make it look like I'm ruining it but I'm really not because this effect is very effective, it works. No such thing as too much because it really, the more you've got, the more buildup you've got, the easier it'll be to rub it off and for it to be flaky and lumpy looking, which is what I want for the effect. I'm just gonna go over this whole structure with this glue just like this all the way around. Gotta do the doors, all the parts where I want the paint peeling, I've gotta do that. It's drying very quick, it's almost disappearing here. I'm going to probably apply a second coat right there where it's drying so flat that it doesn't look like I've got any rubber cement to rub off. So don't be shy about putting this on, you're not gonna ruin the structure, I promise. Now that the rubber cement is dried, now we're gonna paint the single stall engine house. I'm gonna use about 20 pounds of air and I'm using some flocal lacquer based paint. I've still got some of that. We're just gonna spray this puppy white, we're gonna whitewash it. I'm not getting any paint on the inside of the building, I'm, this is a very good Iowa to airbrush, which pinpoints where the paint is going. I'm not really getting any paint on the inside so there's no need to mask this right now. I'm painting around the windows. I need to paint the doors the same way that I'm doing the engine house and the doors also have got a good application of rubber cement on them so that we'll be able to make the peeling paint effect. That'll match. Now in order to make the peeling paint effect, I've already started here, all I simply do is I take my thumb and I run it gently up the building, up the boards, parallel with the grain of wood and I'm getting a real nice peeling effect here, as you can see. And I'm just gonna do this gently all the way around the whole structure because this is working out really nice. Kind of randomly working my finger around this because it's coming right off real nice. A little bit more pressure here. Yeah, that's looking. It's peeled off. The underneath weathered wood is showing through. Look at that. A lot of times another thing I like to do is take a paintbrush. Just do one board at a time. That gives you a subtle effect. That is heavy as I'm getting with my finger, but what you want to be careful with the brush is you don't want streaks that look like lines. You don't want a pattern. You want a random, when this is all done and this goes out for sunlight, this should look just fantastic. I've known some people to take a little white paint over, spray it over this just to make it a little more subtle, which isn't a bad idea. That's helpful. Experiment a little bit. Feel free to experiment. This is all a learning curve. We know what works, but we always discover something new through experimentation that suits our own uses in the hobby. So I'll just finish this. I've got to do all these doors and all the parts and the eaves on the roof. And then we'll put the windows in. Now that the building's weathered, it's time to install the windows. And the windows are all laser cut. They've all got self-stick tape on them, which makes it really convenient to stick them to the acetate. And then I've been taking a knife and carving around the edges of each window section and cutting them out of the acetate. And then I take the two halves of the windows and I very carefully try to peel off that sticky tape and I've pressed fit them together. And it creates a complete window frame with the upper sash. And then you take these other sections that I've got on the acetate, the smaller ones, and that's your upper and lower sash and they go together and everything seems to fit beautifully in the model. These parts are cut very accurately and everything just fits, just as nice as can be. So I'm just taking a little bit of wood glue, dabbing my dental pick in the glue, putting a little glue around the edges and press fitting the windows in place. So this won't take more than 20 minutes to have this finished. And then I'll just put the roof on and it's pretty much doors and just final details and this puppy's done. And it's a very nice kit ready to be photographed outside. Beautiful day to shoot photographs today and I brought out the single stall engine house. I've built it without the roof and I thought it'd be kind of fun to run a few trains on it and just see how it looks and how it's working. And so far so good. I really like the way this building's come out. It's a nice diorama that's just perfect for the location it's built for. And just a little bit more finished work on the turntable and trees and maybe a few more buildings and we'll have something really, really cool here. But that's this diorama pretty much completed. Nothing's ever really completed as we all well know but I've got a good start on this one and it'll take about two weeks to build what it is I've got here so far. And so with that, next month we will continue this series on layout construction whereas we start to finally build the larger layout whereas the shelf layouts will fit into place. It turned out to be a really great finished product layout when it was done. So with that, that is this month's What's Neat for March 2023. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got Matt Stern all the way from beautiful Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at Bachman Industries to give us an update on some of the newest products. This is something we always like to cover on What's Neat keeping you informed as to what's new out there and Bachman Industries is one of our leaders in the industry. So Matt Stern, how are you today? I'm doing very well Ken, how are you? It's really nice to have you. So it looks like you got a lot of neat stuff to talk about today. I do, so the first thing and probably the biggest thing to talk about is by this point in March, our 2023 catalog is out and is shipping to stores. So we've had the online version out for about a month now and you can actually pick up a visible copy now. This is available at most hobby stores and it has all of our new stuff that we have as well as everything in our line that has continued in production. So if you wanna find out about everything that we have that's the place to look. The cover photo is beautiful and that is this locomotive sitting on the table right now in front of us. Oh yeah, that was photographed by a very talented individual. I'm not sure who they were but... It was cold and it was dark and it was a lot of fun to produce. And we were very happy with the shot, it looks fantastic. So tell us, what have you got to show off today? So today I'm gonna go through a few things that we have in the catalog. We're very fortunate to actually already have some early samples for a lot of the stuff that we just announced in this catalog just a few weeks ago. And normally we're not ready with samples at this point so we're pretty excited to show them off. I'll start with probably the coolest thing here. Well, let's not say the coolest thing but one of the coolest things here is the... This is our new end scale Ultamont Corridor Express Charger. Okay. We just released the Amtrak versions of our end scale charger in December and they've been very popular. People have been really happy with them so far which we're obviously very happy with. And just like an HO scale, we're following suit with the commuter schemes now. So we've got the Ultamont Corridor Express one here from California. Nice. And actually they're both from California. We also have the Coaster version from San Diego which unfortunately we don't have a sample of yet but that one is coming as well. And features all pretty much all the same details and features as the HO scale model is the only difference that I'm aware of is we have one lighting functionality difference. The number boards don't light up and the only reason for that is just because of the size of the model we have to choose between the number boards and the flashing beacons on the roof. And of course we're gonna choose the flashing lights. Right. Nice choice. So a few more models that we have here we're sticking in end scale for now. We have two new additions to our Northeast Steel Caboose range. We have the Central Railroad in New Jersey and then we have the Conrail version here. Very nice. And this is a line that has been around for a couple of years now but these are some brand new models we just announced in the catalog. And I know a lot of Northeastern modelers are gonna be very excited for these. And moving to HO scale. This is the big one. This is our Via Rail SCV 42 Charger. What a beautiful paint job. And this was announced as you know this was announced last year but we didn't have a sample away. We didn't even have the artwork yet at that point we just had the photo which Via Rail very kindly let us use. And now we have the model. This is a functioning sample. It was at the Amherst show. So if you were at the show you might have had a chance to see it in person. And yeah we're really excited about this. It's a fantastic looking paint scheme. It's just such a cool looking model and one of the things that people said at the show which I can echo personally is it's so cool looking that even if you don't model Canada it's just one of those things you might have to have. Right. No I agree. Will there at some point be freight our passenger cars to correlate with that? Yes. So in our NMRA announcements in late 2022 we did announce that we are doing the venture cars to go with it. We're doing the entire Via Rail consists so that's I don't have it written down offhand here but I believe it's three coach cars. Might be two coach cars, a business car and a cab car. Perfect. And you're set up to do a train set. The cab car is going to have functioning lights. It's going to have some sound features. So it's not just going to be your run of the mill passenger car. It's going to be as animated as it can get without having a motor. Nice. Nice. And then we have a few more samples here. This is another one that came in our 2022 catalog but again we didn't have a sample at that point. This is our Redding company GP40. This is a really nice addition to our GP40 range. This is the sound value model. So it comes with soundtracks, the economy sound on board. Okay. And it'll just be a nice addition to anyone's GP40 fleet. And we have two new additions from 2023 for our steel coil car range. Now these cars at the time of announcement the first one hadn't even shipped yet but there's been so much popularity, so much interest generated for them that we already felt it was time to introduce some more road names for it. Amen. That's great. And just like the ones in the first release these are going to come with, hopefully this has that. Now I hadn't looked under the hood yet. These don't have loads in them but when you buy them in the store they will have loads in them. So they have removable hoods and you can see inside there's the cradles for the loads. It'll come with six steel coil loads. You can fill the car up or you can run it empty and you can do a whole loading yard scene and it just makes them a little more dynamic. No, it's beautiful. What a nice addition to the line. And then a few new boxcars and HSL that we have here. We have two new additions to our 50 foot outside brace range with the flashing end of train device at the end. Nice. This is Berlin Mills Railway and then we also have one here for Montana Rail Link which I think is a cool addition especially since many rail fans are probably aware Montana Rail Link is going back into being reabsorbed into the BNSF system I believe this year. Nice. So this is a nice kind of a, it can be a nice tribute car for the railroad. Now the end of device is gonna be really cool too. Absolutely. We also have the 40 foot track cleaning boxcar. We have two new paintings for this and the one I have here is probably the cooler of the two. It's the Louisville and Nashville impact demo car. These cars basically they existed to demonstrate what happens if a car is coupled it faster than the mandated four miles per hour. Okay. They had open sides or clear sides. So you could see inside of they would load them full. They'd smash them into the car next to them and everybody watching could see all the boxes and everything go flying. And that car's got boxes in it. So it has an insert in it. So you can see the boxes in there. And what we've done on the car just like in the real thing is we've done a see-through side with an ash plating design on it. And on this side here, we also have which the real car had a one side too. We have the speedometer there which on the real car would show how fast the car is going when it hit the car as it was being coupled into. Wow, that's a lot of thought that went into that car. Absolutely. And this is actually the third impact demo car that we've done in this line. We already did one for Union Pacific and for Santa Fe. And the Santa Fe one is currently in stores now. Very cool. Plus that thing does clean track well. Yes, absolutely. And also in that same vein we also have some new track cleaning gondolas. We have four new examples. This is using our 40 foot gondola style. And we have pin central here. Let's see, we also have Delaware and Hudson. We have Union Pacific in the Silver Maintenance of Ways Scheme. Very nice. And we have a North Pole and Southern Christmas one. So if you have a Christmas railroad, if you're only running HO scale trains at Christmas, you now have a track cleaning car that'll work with your railroad. Perfect. And let's see, we also have one new addition here to our HO scale Northeastern caboose. We had two that were announced in the catalog but I only have one sample here and this is the new Haven style. Okay. The McGinnis scheme. And this one's pretty cool. It's got white ends. Some of the cars have black ends there are a few that have white ends and it just makes for a little bit more of a striking design. Nice, nice Matt. And that's about it for new samples now. Something I've got behind me here is the city sprinter set. This is something that also started shipping at the end of last year. This comes with an ACS-64 locomotive. It doesn't come with sound or DCC but it comes ready to upgrade with sound and DCC. It's got the speaker already installed and we actually just announced in our catalog we have a DCC sound upgrade kit that you can buy for it. That's great. That's fantastic. And that's a great train set to have. Oh, absolutely. And it also comes with our new concrete tie track which is worth mentioning. That track is beautiful. No, the Bachman Easy Track hands down is just reliable. It works and the concrete track additions have been great in the last year and a half to two years. Absolutely fantastic. This is the best time I say to be in the hobby because of all the amazing models that we now have at our fingertips. And it's no exception to the neat stuff that you guys produce out there in Philadelphia. So Matt, is that about it for this show? That's about it. I mean, I could go on. We have plenty of other things in this catalog. We don't have samples for all of them but I think it's best to say at this point, if you want to find out more, get one of our catalogs. Amen, that's a great, great catalog. There's a lot of stuff in there, a Thomas line, so many different scales. Just it's amazing the variety that you guys, all those skews and numbers you have to keep track of. Absolutely. All right, so with that, that is this segment for What's Neat. Thank you very much, Matt Stern, for being with us today. All right, thanks for having me. Fantastic. All of the products seen on this episode of What's Neat are available from Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois or order online at LombardHobby.com. Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at BachmanTrains.com and buy ROCA prototype models. We make it real. Check out their website at www.ROCAmodels.com.