 The What Sneak 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 BachmanTrains.com. And thank you for helping us support the best hobby in the world. This is What Sneak for June 2022. I'm your host Ken Patterson. And this month we really do have a good show in that Jennifer Kirk provides us with a great 15-minute segment on how to make very realistic looking trees quickly. She uses a technique that I've never actually seen before and it's a breath of fresh air. Thank you Jenny for that segment. Also we look at the Anacubic Viper 3D printer. This is a filament printer and it's absolutely amazing. I show you the setup. I show you how to go about printing an item that's already on the chip in the printer. Thank you G&L Robotics USA.com for supplying us with this wonderful piece of equipment to share with the viewers of What Sneak. Also we've got a segment from Larry Harrington and Doug Blaine of Bachman Industries out in Philadelphia Pennsylvania where they share with us and show brand new products that are just available on the market. Some really cool stuff this month on What Sneak. Also our favorite drone pilot creates modeling ideas from above this month, Dan Scheidel. And he shares with us one of my favorite locations out in California, the Keti Y. Absolutely beautiful. I just can't wait. It's easy. It looks like a microengineering girder project once you see this video. It's pretty amazing. Also our sponsor Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois wants to announce the fact that Alex Kovech is their new sales and media director for the store. We look forward to working with you Alex and we wish you all the best. You belong to a great family up there at Lombard Hobbies. Be sure to check out the What Sneak this week video podcast that we record down here every Saturday night keeping you updated on what's new in the hobby with new products, a lot of great interviews and once in a while we do work in a couple of how-tos in there with our guests. And so with that let's continue on with the rest of this June 2022 What Sneak. Hi there to you. I'm Jennifer Kirk and today I'm going to be taking you through a step-by-step guide for building some really quite unique trees from a natural product that's known as Seafoam or Sea Grass. Now this has been available for quite some time now through hobby stores all over the country and a lot of modelers have had some great results making trees from it as its structure really does mimic trees in the real world. However it does have a few shortcomings not least that you can be very limited in terms of the shape and size of this plant as it grows naturally and also it can be somewhat brittle in use and does suffer a little bit with bits breaking off if not treated correctly. Well today the method that I've got for you makes use of a plastic armature down the center of the tree and using that to mimic the trunk and it's really really strong and gives these model trees some great resilience. It also then allows you to build up the foliage naturally using pieces of the sea grass to mimic branches and boughs of a tree and you can make any size and shape of tree that you want using this method and I'm going to show you how to get that armature to a point where you can actually then build any tree to suit your layout and also put it into any season that you choose if you have a winter layout that's no problem whatsoever you can use these armatures as built in this video with a dusting of snow and you've got this great deciduous tree just ready to plant on your winter layout you can do them in an autumnal glow mimicking a tree whose leaves are about to fall or you could go for the blossom of spring or the full bloom of leaves in the height of summer it's entirely up to you but this method is easy and straightforward to follow there's no difficult bits going on here and hopefully you too will be able to feel confident enough to have a go by the time we get to the end of this video. Now I'm going to be using parts from this particular kit which is from War World Scenics and it gives you all of the different materials that you need to utilize this method however there's nothing in this box that you can't buy separately from a number of different suppliers so I'm just using this for convenience but depending on what your model hobby store sells you can make up all the parts in this kit from a number of different manufacturers and sources. Inside the kit we've got a number of different items most obvious are these plastic tree armatures and these are quite easily available through a variety of different online sources and you can buy them in bulk very very cheaply. The other ingredient here in this box is a product known as sea foam or sea grass it's a natural product it's a real plant and it's chosen for the fact that it resembles some really great and fine tree branches when used in a number of different hobby scales and we also have some packets of this very finely ground foam which we're going to be using for the final scattering of the foliage on the tree. As you can see here you can buy a huge variety of these plastic tree armatures in all shapes and sizes these are some that I've just got off the internet and you can see that we've got everything from fir trees to some quite intricate trees here and there's always something that will represent any of the types of trees that you want on your model layout or scene but for this method what we're going to look to do is take just a basic tree and a set of wire cutters and this is where this method really does differ from the methods which you're probably used to we're just going to snip all of these branches off which is going to leave a little stub this might seem like a very strange thing to do but the reasoning is going to come clear as we move on to the second stage so what we're left with is this primary trunk it's very strong slightly flexible and this is an area where the plastic tree armatures do have a great advantage over the sea foam being used as a complete tree what we're going to do is grab some of these pieces of this seagrass or sea foam each piece looks very very tree like but we're going to actually pick smaller pieces and just break them off and these give us little clumps that we will use as branches in and of themselves that we can use during this build and what I like to do is just get one of these hobby clamps they're really great for holding pieces in one position and leaving your hands free so I'm going to start by putting this tree armature piece in there and then the glue that you're going to need is super glue and in all honesty I know that there are some very expensive premium brands on the market but I've had great results with the really cheap stuff that you can get in the budget shops so what we're going to look to do here is just use a little tiny bit of super glue to glue each of these small pieces of the seagrass to the tree and the reason that we use super glue is that we want that to grab fairly quickly and you can see that it's in position I'm going to look through some of these additional pieces we're just looking for something that really works for the shape of tree that we're trying to produce this is going to be a good piece just to make up the very top of our tree armature a little dab of super glue we just build up each of these pieces in turn don't worry about the differences in color this will all be fixed at a later stage in the build over the space of several minutes you can build up quite a nice structure of a tree as you can see the super glue has with a little bit of effort in places just stuck those pieces of the quite fine sea foam on as a great representation of the smaller branches that you see on a real tree you can also add some variety to this method to represent different types of tree but I've just gone for a nice run-of-the-mill generic tree here just to prove the system of building these the next stage that I want to do here now is once the super glue has dried I'm going to be using just a spray paint and I've chosen this there's a lot on the market this is just simply one which was really easy in a local store to me and it's a kind of textured paint and you can see there on the lid it's got a kind of almost a sandy texture to it so any textured paint is going to be great for this next stage and what I want to do is just gently mist over the tree from a distance of maybe about 12 to 18 inches really really lightly and keep turning the tree as well so you get it from all different angles now what this will do is it will just give a uniformity of color to the branches themselves it'll take some of the shine off the trunk in the center and the glue too will just help to stick together some of these branches just help with the resilience of the armature so I'm going to go outside now and give it a quick blast and what you can see is that that's gone a great length to unify the whole look of this tree interior so that all the branches and that plastic trunk all look exactly the same shade of paint don't use gloss paint because a shiny tree interior does look a bit peculiar and this textured paint really does do a great job and not only providing a much more matte finish but that texture too makes some of this look like real bar which is just what we want for the next stage of this process I'm going to be using finely ground foam now there's a number of different great products on the market that you can use and woodland scenics do do a great range that is very very readily available of fine turf and ground foam which is perfect for building this kind of thing I've also got a ready supplier materials from a company called warworld scenics and I've used their products in some of these videos before really it's just a case of picking appropriate colors to match with the type of tree that you intend to have on your layout again this is really important if you're looking to build a particular species that has a high amount of oil so for example some of the fir trees that grow in higher altitudes and have to deal with things like very very low temperatures they tend to have a slightly bluish tinge to them now that doesn't mean that you need to actually use a very blue vibrant scatter but it does mean that you have to pick your choice of colors very carefully and that will set the scene of where your model layout is set for me I've chosen some of these olive greens and dark greens and I'm going to use a mix of these four just to make sure that we get a little bit of variety again using one color can start to look a little bit fake so I always advocate using two or more colors just to build up a really good varied foliage cover in terms of glues again I have to hand static grass layering spray that I've used before again from warworld scenics but woodland scenics and a number of other manufacturers also produce these kind of hobby glues which are equally good for this task and as a money saving tip you can even go down to the budget store and pick up some really really cheap extra hold hair spray and that works quite well too as part of this stage I tend to use something like an old cardboard box just to provide a little bit of protection to your modelling workbench from getting covered in all of this foam just get some of that spray glue and again like we did with the paint we're just going to very very gently mist it through the leaves now we're not looking to try and clog the branches with the glue it works just fine if we have a very very light dusting and I'm just going to sprinkle in some of this fine scatter if you're not happy with the color that you've got you can mix it up and maybe go for a darker green just sprinkle some of that through the tree as we go you can spray more in if we need to and actually it does sometimes help to be able to pick up the armature on the stand mist some of the glue through and then just just try and get some of this ground foam into the leaves now what I would say is actually the finer ground foam is probably the best and you don't want big clumps that's quite important big clumps will just look a bit peculiar on a very fine armature like this don't be frightened to add a little bit more of the spray glue if you're using something like extra hold hair spray it's really really inexpensive and that means you don't have to worry about using an awful lot of it and let's try another color so we've got here some dark green extra fine and this looks to be the perfect dark scatter to match up with that olive green that we used and then by getting those multiple colors it will just really make it a kind of a random look that's what we're going for nature is random so that means we want to replicate that randomness and then we're going to give it one last final blast just to secure in place that fine foliage so you can see here that the tree is now pretty much complete the glue and the paint does tend to dry nice and quickly and you can see that the end result is a really great natural looking tree that is perfect for just spiking straight into your model I use something like an old screwdriver such as this is ideal and with a small hammer I just create a hole for the tree to go into utilizing a little bit of glue which is put some in the hole it's just simply a case orientating it and then gently fitting it down into the hole in this shot you can see three different methods of tree making all together this is the one that we've just made now and you can see the light open branches allowing light to pass through just like a real tree next to it we have a wire armature tree and you can see that these are equally as effective but give you a different variety so that your model layout doesn't look all uniform the third type of tree down here is made just from that seafoam all on its own you can see that when we compare it to this method these are nowhere near as good and this method is so easy you too can get great results well as you saw in today's video it's really super easy to build up these hybrid style trees yourself and it doesn't take any great skill to do it even a novice modeler will have great results with this method so i hope i've inspired you to have a go i'm jennifer kirk and we'll catch you next time for this segment of what's neat we're going to explore the technology of 3d printing now we've done that on a previous what's neat video back in december 2015 when we explored all the benefits and all the wonderful things that the dremel 3d idea builder printer could do for you that was a printer that was available at the home depot and or online at a price point of around $1000 this machine is at a price point of around $550 which is you might say half of that but it's a seven years later technology and things obviously always come down now what we're looking at right now in front of me is the anti-cubic viper print machine this is a filament printer just like the printer that we shared in that december 2015 video this printer is different in that on that original machine that we shared with you you had to level the table prior to doing a print using knobs underneath the table and then using a gap tool to make sure that the head of the printer was the right spacing from the print table before you started your print this machine does it all automatically as the head works its way around the table completely from end to end corner to corner and spots in the middle just to make sure everything's preset up before you start your print now on this machine we're going to print some owls they're already on the chip that comes with it we got this machine from general robotics out of dolphin alabama general robotics usa.com they've got a lot of various types of printers filament printers and resin printers and greg summerland has got customer service that is second to none in fact when we set this machine up he was walking us through it on skype which was very easy although the instructions that come with this machine actually explain it very thoroughly and make it quite simple to do without any online help so in this video what we're going to do is share with you start to finish from unboxing the product explaining to you everything that comes with it and then the process that we go through to go ahead and print our first product in this case it's going to be owls so with that let's enjoy this segment of what's neat the anycubic viper printer came in a really nice box well packed james your gear helps unpackage first we see the monitor coming out this is a monitor where you will actually control the machine and all its functions additionally there was a power cord then there was a bracket that will be used to hold the filament next to the viper printer then there is the big spool of filament thread that was placed into the box now this was packaged by gnl robotics usa.com and greg summerland gave us that large rule spool of thread or actually the printing filament material to go with it as james pulls off the first layer of protective foam you'll see there's a bag of instructions that includes the power cords and then you will see the main mast this is the tower of the printer this will stand upright on the machine and this in fact is what holds the printhead as james slowly pulled this out of the box it was evident that there was a lot of thought that went into the creation of so the packaging itself just to make sure that this wonderful machine ships to your home absolutely secure in the bottom of the box we see the printer's base are otherwise known as the print bed this also was securely placed inside a custom built foam package as james pulls this out and i remove the box off the table you can see the basic components now that will make up our anti cubic viper filament printer one additional note that i wanted to share with you is on the front of the machine you'll see that there is a drawer and inside this drawer is held some additional tools that will help in the use of the machine which includes allen wrenches that are metric a wire cutter that's designed to cut the filament material and a needle that's inside of a plastic container which is used as a clean out tool for the printer's head upon powering up the machine you're greeted in the lcd screen with a message welcoming you to the product and a screen showing various options of what you can do at this point moving forward i then guided the filament into the filament guide that's the black thing you see here and then proceeded to string the filament into the tube that will lead to the extruder head upon putting the filament into the head i pushed onto the screen filament feed this button causes the extruder motor to automatically feed the filament into the head as the head is heated up to 230 degrees this process will continue until you push the button to cause it to then stop at this point the filament part of the machine is ready to print now it was time to use the auto leveling feature to level the table i pushed the level button and then i pushed auto leveling and then i had a prompt that said okay and it started right away where the head slowly worked its way around the entire table probing up and probing down in various areas until the table was absolutely level to start the printing process i pressed print and then i looked at the file and here it is a pair of owls i then pressed that and i went further down and hit the print button upon doing this the bed and the head started to heat up once the temperatures got up to 230 degrees for the head and 60 degrees for the bed the printing process then began automatically as the head started to move into position to find the center of the table where it would then start printing the base for both of our owls let's now watch as we print both owls this is not going to be time lapse photography as i visited the machine every 15 or 20 minutes just to visualize to show the progress as it goes through the two hour printing process to print these beautiful little figures again this is a test just to see how the machine would work in a future video we will go ahead and print something that would be more useful for us in the hobby using the programs that are available on the internet in a future what's neat video but at this point we've got some beautiful little owls the machine works absolutely perfectly the detail is finite and i think that this is a great overview as a starter just to understand how this machine works and with that that's this segment for what's neat for this segment of what's neat i've got larry herrington all away from beautiful philadelphia pennsylvania you'll know him as one of the principles of bachman industries out there and they've got some exciting new models like they always like to share on the what's neat show and today's no exception because what you showed me a few minutes ago is amazing larry how are you today i'm doing great ken how are you today it's a beautiful day larry everything's good spring is here it actually just started to look beautiful it was pretty cloudy this morning but it's cleared up and it's very nice outside now it's awesome spring has sprung yes which means the nm re national is getting so much closer i so look forward in another month or two hanging out with you guys at that show because as you know this is the june what's neat we're recording right now right so we'll be there in august this year it's which is a little later than normal but that's okay it gives us time to get stuff together for the show absolutely so what do you got going on today larry today i got a sample of our h.o. hudson locomotive i'm going to show you the locomotive first and i believe we're sharing some photography stills with you as well nice um a very nice model it's great detail it's going to come equipped with um wow sound full sound dcc which is the the premier version of their sound the same um sound unit that we're using in our k4s and also in our charger locomotives and our acs64 so we've been um the sound is incredible super realistic this will have the their new um chuff finity feature built into the which is an amazing feature that has like over a thousand different chuffs of sequences and it can just it varies depending on what the load of the locomotive is if it's going uphill downhill you're increasing the throttle decreasing the throttle it's it's just amazing sound sounds like the real thing i mean you've been on steam engines before and you've heard this real thing it doesn't have that um you know machine gun sound that you get with some other sound systems out there so it's uh really nice and it come it'll have the keep alive feature built into it um which is nice for you know you have a little dirty track you don't have a drop out on your your command or your uh sound um we will have it in four numbers um with two different lettering schemes so we have the the uh as delivered room in lettering and then later on we have we also have the gothic lettering so we have two two numbers of each one um prototypically numbered and lettered um it will have a drop down coupler add on in the front so you can you know we we always equip our locomotives with a operating easy make coupler in the front allows double heading or you know using for yard service if you had to but um but in typical service they would have the coupler drop down and and we have a a dummy coupler insert that goes into that um pilot there so that you can simulate that for you know the heading a passenger train or whatnot so right very very beautiful and tell us what road name is that coming in it's well it's the only road name new york central for hudson yes that's the iconic uh locomotive for their their railroad that's absolutely true and what a beautiful locomotive that is we used to have one of those out here at the transportation museum and it was such a beautiful locomotive lots that's great so um so we're working hard on this this is our first test shot we're just going to review the tooling which it looks pretty sharp to me i don't see too many errors on it but we'll we'll correct anything we find and then we should have a running sample soon and then we'll be able to share some video with you that's absolutely awesome larry larry tell me how wonderful it is to be in an industry where you get to work every day with your passion well it's this was my hobby from you know from when i was like 11 years old i started really seriously in the hobby and um you know i got my first job at a competitor lifelike products because i saw an ad in the paper i said wow they make trains i'm going to go work for that company so i started there and worked my way through um williams trains and now with bachmann been been at bachmann longer than any other company so i'm real happy with the company here where they treat us all real well and uh you know we make we have the resources to make great products so it's uh it's it's a very rewarding experience overall that's absolutely awesome i am so happy for you and i look forward to getting out there and visiting with all you guys and if nothing else are you coming to st lisa's summer i will be there yes fantastic i look forward to having you live here on this show great on the week the weekly podcast has really gotten legs it's doing very well and i just we're just going to keep going and see where it goes good deal we really enjoyed the partnership we're doing here to get our message out to all of our viewers so thank you so much now we're going to do a second segment here where we're going to talk to Doug Blaine and he's got some exciting stuff to talk about as well doesn't he yes he does uh we'll let him give you the surprise announcement over uh when he when he takes over so i'm going to turn the mic over to Doug and uh here we go perfect now we have Doug Blaine the vice president of marketing from bachmann industries out in beautiful philadelphia pennsylvania and Doug also has some amazing products to talk to us about i have i have one to show you i want to share this is a a debut and we have a new ho scale model all new tooling and this character is called uh ryan in our thomas and friends line so this is a tank locomotive it's based on a great northern railway class n2 and this style locomotive was originally used in urban settings originally in london england and also glasgow and edinberg scotland later in later use so anyway primarily an urban saddle tag engine it's an o6 2 wheel configuration i'm not going to show his face he's not quite ready for his face to be shown there are a few pieces missing it's an early sample but i think you'll get the idea we're very pleased it's got an open cab it's got a separately applied rear lamp separately applied front lamp the side rods are going to have some additional contour details and there's going to be a few minor changes but this is a first look and just a friendly reminder for people who may be interested in getting into ho scale thomas or already have ho scale thomas products from us we have uh almost uh 30 different styles of ho scale locomotives almost 50 styles of rolling stock and wagons make it an end scale you have large scale examples in front of you so we cover a lot of ground for uh modelers who want to uh they're to enjoy thomas themselves or for their their kids or grandkids that's absolutely anyway that's that's new in our thomas line that's awesome duck people say all the time in our industry how do we get the youth into the hobby and that is one way to do it uh absolutely and just one other category i didn't mention as well we have um ho scale narrow gauge locomotives uh we should by the time this airs we should have received our narrow gauge peter sam locomotive nice um and that that will be uh that is uh the narrow gauge is a scale and size that a lot of more serious model railroaders have converted to narrow gauge lines um and it's it's easy to do so it's just another area of interest that we're supporting with our thomas and friends line check check out everything in our catalog or or on our website at www dot bachman trains dot com that's absolutely right i've got one of those narrow gauge locomotives right here in my hand i don't know that the camera's going to pick it up but i do have some outdoor photography i shot where i tried to make this look actually like a prototype locomotive and i had some four to f150s and vehicles parked around it to give it that realistic credibility now these run on n scale track is that correct that's correct yep hos it's hos scale narrow gauge but it runs on n track that's amazing i see in you know british or scale terminology would be um termed as 009 that's fantastic i see a whole new line of stuff because people will convert this to prototype stuff and yet still it's great for a small layout a beginner's layout as well absolutely doug thank you so much for being with us and like i said to larry i'm so looking forward to seeing you in st louis in a couple of months at the animari national here in st louis i look forward to it as well can you have a short commute to that to that national so i look forward to seeing you there and a lot of your viewers as well hopefully doug thank you so much you are the best and that is this segment for what's neat all the products seen on this episode of what's neat are available from lombard hobbies in lombard illinois or order online at lombard hobby dot com bachman trains now that's the way to run a railroad check out their website at bachman trains dot com