 Well, there's your problem. Hello, I'm Thomas Howell. And What's Neat July starts right now. This is What's Neat for July 2017. I'm your host Ken Patterson, and this month we've got a pretty good show. First of all, Jason Quinn stops by and shares with us a 1980s era cold train that he's weathered, and it really came out pretty neat on the show this month. Also, George Boca Talk from Soundtrack stops by and shares with us some of the secrets behind the Sonomi 2's HEP head-end power feature that it has for powering up the passenger cars in our passenger trains. Richard Rans shows us his beautiful OM30 layout this month, one of the most magnificent layouts that I've seen with scenery that goes 10 feet to the ceiling. Also this month, we meet Mike Pine, owner and designer of Wild West Scale Model Builders, and we listen to a really cool story about how he got into the laser cutting business designing kits for our industry. We look at Bachman's USRA 462 locomotive in HO scale, and we take it right out of the box, set up the quartering and just some of the features that aren't necessarily set up from the factory so that it comes out running absolutely perfect. For tool tips this month, we do something kinda cool. First of all, we examine various different ways to dust our layout and remove dirt from our models, but then we go a little further and create our own custom-made tool for just doing just that, removing dust specifically from our model railroad layouts. Now I've been working a little bit on the log mill facility, the BTS log mill project, primarily focusing on the lighting aspect of things so that I can clearly see it and work on it. I've added about 37 feet of track light and then 28 heads to that, and at about three watts a piece, I'm still only burning 84 watts of electricity to light the entire area. Also LED lights have come to the Garden Railroad recently, whereas I've been experimenting with a little bit of this outdoor lighting, putting these three watt lights of various types out on the Garden Railroad just to add a little ambiance and something a little bit different from Tiki Torches. Otherwise, that's the lineup this month for July's 2017 What's Neat. So let's continue on with the rest of the show. What's Neat? We're gonna discuss dusting models. Now there's a whole subject. Dust is not our friend. You leave your door open, you leave a few windows open and the dust from the outside summer air blows in or the pollen from the spring blows in and it gets on all the models and just gives a nice even coating that we don't want on our models. And how is it? What is the best way that I've found after dusting models for years? I've got like 300 feet length of shelf of models. It needs to be dusted about every three months. And what I like to do generally is I pull all the models off of the shelves and I'll put them on a table and then I'll clean the shelves with these microfiber towels. These things are great. Microfiber, whoever invented that product, they're sitting in a big house somewhere proud because this stuff works. What it does is dust attaches itself to this material and it doesn't release unless you take it and shake it hard outside. So like when I'm dusting my rivers or my flat surfaces on the layout, it's perfect for that. I've seen this microfiber also come in mitts where you can take the mitt and simply put it on your hand and then go about dusting all the shelves after you've removed the models. This is a great way for removing dust. Microfiber works. Another thing of course I like to do is to use my vacuum cleaner, my very soft horsehair brush and that's pretty good for dusting off the top of the models. But what you wanna be careful of is when you're using a vacuum cleaner around a lot of these fine, beautiful, detailed models, you'll suck the screens right off or if there's a loose piece, you can suck it right off. And the way to avoid that and the safest way that I know currently to dust models is simply to take a paint brush and your vacuum cleaner, nozzle at the same time and hold the nozzle near the model and then dust the model off as you're vacuuming it. And the reason that this is good is because A, the brush is gentle and B, it's able to get in between the handrails without damaging anything. You brush off the top, the fronts. All of the detail is not damaged by a very soft brush like this. And of course if you've got your vacuum nozzle right here near the model, then you can just suck the dust right off. A lot of times I've got my airbrush spray booth set up over here near the layout and as a train is running by on the layout I'll dust off the top of the train and the air from the spray booth that just sucks right outside. So all of that dust that's put up into the air isn't the problem. Another important thing to bring up is the fact that when you're using your vacuum cleaner to vacuum your carpets and then you look at your models a few hours later you might notice that there is a coating of dust on the models. And that's because most vacuum cleaner bags especially the cheap ones, aren't very fine material. What you wanna do for your shop vac and for your vacuum cleaner for doing carpets is to get the finest filter that you can get. It'll reduce the air flow a little bit. It might make your motor get a little warm but the fact is it won't release the small dust particles into the air. And really that's something that you wanna pay attention to. When I'm working in my wood shop and I'm cutting wood in the old days you can imagine the amount of dust that I would get on the layout. It would just take hours to clean up. And then I got smart and I put in a dust filtration system onto each saw and each appliance in the shop so that as the machine is running all the dust is sucked through this huge filtration system that reduces any dust that can come out down to two microns. So it's a very, very good way if you've got a wood shop that's close to the layout it's something that I simply had to do. Now I've also discovered these makeup brushes. You can find these at Walgreens or various stores. Makeup brushes have got really fine, lots of hair but I've discovered that there's such a thing as too much, too much fiber doesn't really help. More or less gets hung up on the model and actually it can do more damage than good to the handrails. So makeup brushes don't work. It's truly these artist brushes. And I like the round ones. These are the same ones that we use for putting ballast on our layout. So for spreading ballast and for dusting models with a vacuum cleaner I find that's the most reliable way to do it. Now the last thing I wanna talk about are these feather dusters. I've experimented with a lot of different types of feather dusters and what I have found is a lot of them have got fibers that will get hooked and connected to the horns or parts of the model and they'll get hung up. Now I don't know what this one's made out of. It's some sort of a synthetic fiber. Almost like a fiber optic material but this one is fantastic in that I can actually dust the models on the shelves right before a videotaping session or right before a guest would come over where I can literally dust the models and not drag anything off of the shelves. It does really well on the flat wood. It doesn't hang up on any of the details on these models and it works really well. So with that, those ways to dust off models on shelves and on the layout, let's go over into the shop now and discuss the various types of vacuum head attachments that are good for dusting and working on the layout. I wanna continue on with dusting by talking about the vacuum cleaner brushes themselves. Now my old favorite brush has always been the horse hair brush that you can just hook up to the vacuum cleaner. It was always really soft on the models and was great for cleaning up the track. It's just quick, it's fast and gentle. While I have had this one for probably 14 years, it's starting to get a little bit worn down. So I tried to buy another one on eBay that I thought would be similar to this which came out to be a brush that wasn't so soft. It still worked really well for vacuuming up the ballast off of my track in the experiment. It sucked it up rather quick. And it was gentle enough to actually brush the top of freight cars but it's not hair, it's more like a nylon plastic and I prefer the horse hair. So the thought is, well one more brush I wanna talk about. First there's this brush from ShopVac. This brush works really well. I tested it on the Swiss yard area by putting down a lot of ballast and then drawing this brush through that ballast and trying to vacuum it up. And it actually did a pretty good job of that but the hole is about three and a half to four inches long and about a quarter of an inch wide. So it really, you've gotta be patient. It takes a while to thoroughly clean up the area as opposed to the horse hair brush that was much quicker. So my thought was, why couldn't we make our own vacuum brush specifically for dusting models? Now we know paint brushes are great for dusting models and that's what I like about the horse hair brush is you've got that paint brush-like fiber on the end which is very delicate on handrails and walkways of locomotives. So why couldn't we take two of these brushes, join them together, cut them to a shape and size that would be good where I could then maybe connect an old vacuum cleaner mount like this onto this type of structure. And then at that point the question becomes at what length is too long or too short for the bristles to be effective for cleaning our models. So let's see what continues on as I do this project. Let's see how this turns out. This could be a viable option for creating our own custom-made vacuum cleaner brush just for our models. So I quite honestly myself want to know how this one turns out. So let's see what happens next on this experiment. I started the process of building our custom-made vacuum cleaning brushes by sanding the clear coat off of each one of the brush's wooden handles to ensure a good glue bond and to allow me to stain the wood with some red oak stain a little further in this process. Using Carpenter's wood glue, I glued the handles together. I then clamped the brushes together tight and let this set up overnight using clamps. Using a trowel, I divided the brushes fibers into two sections. I wrapped masking tape around this to keep things divided up as I then ran the brush through the bandsaw, cutting it, making two brushes, measuring about three and a half inches square. After cutting off the brushes handles, I started making a vacuum attachment that would connect to our wooden brush by cutting the synthetic fibers off of the plastic brush that I just purchased on eBay. And I used a razor blade and that cut these fibers off real clean. Once all the fibers were cut off, I matched the diameter of the black rubber attachment to a hole cutting bit, a forter bit of the same size and proceeded to drill this hole into our wood vacuum brushes woodwork. But I only wanted to drill it in about an eighth of an inch as I didn't want to take the chance of ruining the drill bit by cutting into the small nails and staples that actually hold the brushes fibers into the wood. To cut through the nails, I used a three-quarter inch high-speed steel drill bit cutting all the way through our wood brush. Using an oscillating drum sander, I enlarged three-quarter inch hole to match the diameter needed to fit our black attachment. This type of sander cut through the fibers, the wood and the nails with no problems at all. I removed our new vacuum cleaner brush from the vise and pulled off the masking tape holding the fibers. I then test fit the black plastic attachment handle to our newly cut hole and everything fit perfect. So so far so good for this experiment. I repeated the hole cutting process on our second brush attachment. This time I drilled all the way through with a forter bit. It didn't hurt the bit and it cut the hole very clean all the way through the brush. I removed the brush from the vise and proceeded to pull off the masking tape, revealing our second vacuum cleaner brush for this experiment. I test fit another black plastic vacuum brush to our wooden hole and again, this one fit perfect. And with that, we have two brushes to work with. Now I proceeded to cut the fibers off of one of the brushes with scissors, cutting off about, I wanna say an inch, which left about one and a half inches long fibers that will be used for the vacuuming process. I then stained the wood with red oak stain, being careful not to get any of this on the horsehair fibers. After the stain dried, I then applied four coats of polyurethane to both of our brushes just to make them shine and look really nice. I attached the black plastic hose adapters to our wood brushes by mixing a little bit of five minute epoxy and then applying this around the black rubber sleeve on each one of the vacuum cleaner attachments and then fitting this into the wood. And then I set this aside and wanted to just simply let it set up and cure. After the glue cured, I put our new dusting and vacuuming tools to the test. Starting with the rocks poured onto the switch yard, I used the long hair brush. And you know what? It really sort of had problems sucking up the rocks due to the long fibers as I think we were losing some suction. So I would say this one didn't really do so well, but the shorter brush on the other hand, with the shorter fibers worked much better. It still had suction issues due to the fact I discovered that the actual horse hair fibers themselves were clogging up the hole and it was actually reducing our stream of air. I solved this problem by removing some of the horse hairs in the center of the brush with a pair of scissors. This greatly improved the performance of the shorter fiber brush when tested again, sucking up the ballast off of the layout. I then tested the long hair brush on some very dusty large scale look motives. The results were sort of dismal in that it just didn't get the dust that was caked on off of the models. The shorter hair fiber brush did much better at this task, removing most of the dust that the other brush had missed. The only method that removed all the dust completely was a tried and true paint brush and vacuum cleaner method. The short hair brush excelled at dusting my BLMA bridge and my resin river surface. It also did well removing the fresh dust on these HO scale look motives without any damage to the models at all, making this short hair brush the true winner in our test. The long hair brush, to be fair, did have its strong points by simply removing the dust from my furniture and flat surfaces in the studio with pretty good success. While our new vacuum brush tools each had their own individual high points, I still think the best way to remove dust from our models is with a simple soft artist brush to kick up the dust and a vacuum hose close by to capture all the airborne particles. I'd call this a very interesting experiment this month with mixed results and that's this month's tool tips on What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, now you know it's my job on the show to tell you about magnificent model manufacturers when I find them. And I've run into Mike Pine here who has been creating laser kits now for 13 years, he started his company in 2004, Wild West Scale Model Builders. And Mike, tell us a little bit about why in the world did you start a model laser company? What got you into this? Well, I think I, well I graduated with my master's in architecture and I started doing architectural models for different companies around town. And then my dad's friend, my business partner, he knew this guy across the street from him whose house had burned down, he was a school teacher. And I needed a resume builder because I thought I was going to do residential architecture at the time. So I designed a house for him and I drew the plans out and everything and kind of walked him through what he wanted and how it turned out on the design. And he couldn't quite understand it so I decided to build him a model, one that could come apart, the roof apart, the floors and everything. And he could understand it. So then I was down at the local hobby store, Caboose Hobbies, because I'm in Colorado. And they were like, hey, you can do this for model train industry. And I'm like, no way. I thought you just, you know, you could, you played with that as a kid and they said, yeah, you can. So then, yeah. So I went to my first narrow gauge convention in Detroit, Michigan, and got a good reception and I'm from there. What models do you have in your line now? Different scales. I have about 30 individual kits across the scales. I have about 86. Six kits, that's a lot. So are the lasers keeping you going or are you keeping them going? Or is it a little danceable? It's a but danceable. Tell us a little bit about your line. I understand you model create absolute prototypes from structures that are in Colorado. Well, both, yes. I do, most of the mining kits are all prototypical because I like to do kind of preservation projects, ad lib. So I do preservation projects with the mining stuff, kind of historically record them. So that part is completely accurate and prototypical. And then some of the others, I've just studied a lot of the proportions of older buildings and then put them together and made kind of my own creations of Western style buildings. But I do have some. Well, I'll get hooked up with you down the road and arrange something where we can build a few of these structures on the show and show the folks that watch the show how easy and how they're designed because that's always a reassuring thing to pass on to the modelers is that you had the foresight to design a kit going in that's easy to build so that when you get to the end point, things fit together, which is always so important. Correct. That's exactly what we do. The Silverton house, that's a prototype, correct? Yeah, that's the house that I actually designed for the client. Okay. Totally comes apart. Oh, that's magnificent. That's an architectural model. And everything, yeah. So everything's precision, cut, fit and everything. Tell us before we go, Mike, what website would we go to to look you up to be able to order some of these beautiful models? It's wildwestmodels.com. And that's where you'll find everything. And we also carry the Western scale models line of detailed parts and castings as well. Nice, Mike. Thank you for being on What's Neat. Well, thank you very much. For this segment of What's Neat, we've got a special guest. We've got Jason Quinn, who came from Indianapolis, Indiana. I was lucky enough to meet him at the NMRA show last year. That was a 2016 show that was in Indianapolis. What a great guy. But the fact is today he brought us a train and you know how it is with the model trains. It's one thing when you look at an individual freight car or when you look at an entire train, it's 33 feet long. Most artists are used to painting on a simple canvas. So it's in front of you all the time. But with Jason, I thought it would be great to be able to show his entire train. And so we've got Jason in the studio today and I just want to hand it over to him and let him show us the magnificent pre, right about early 1980s cold train chassis that he's made for us and kind of talk about it a little bit. So Jason, let me hand it over to you. Thanks, Ken. Today I bought the, it's a chassis system cold train because that's my favorite railroad and that's what a model, so that's what we got. But Ken's right, this train is, I think it's about 40 cars long. I don't think I have all of them here today. But what we're going to talk about is complete train weathering in this segment. But when you have a complete train and if you want to weather to the high levels that you see on this show and you see on the weathering shop and those kind of guys, that take some serious time. And a lot of us are busy and we don't have that kind of time. So this is what this train is set up for. I have a few key cars in it that are weathered really well. And I place those at the front of the train and at the rear of the train because that's where the eye gets drawn most because I take this to the club. I take it and run it at shows and I run it on my own layout. So like I said, I think the key cars are important to draw the eye to, like I said, the caboose and the locomotives because that's what everybody looks at. And then I have filler cars in between and maybe one or two good ones scattered in there to draw the eye also. And as Ken mentioned, this is the train and you'll see some run-bys of it. And I want you to pay attention to what I just said with the key car placement and basically check it out because you don't need to put a whole lot of time into every car to get an effective train. So with that said, we'll show you the run-bys. I want to say a few things about the cars in the train and how they're actually weathered. The, I guess the designer cars, we'll call them, the ones that grab the attention. I actually got from a model aired hobbyist, Mike Confalone has a series on there that you can buy on their page and it's worth every penny. I'm not joking. Without that stuff, I wouldn't be where I'm at today. But these cars, I have about five of them. The first two here are weathered to what he did with his Chessie Hopper. I followed his instructions and I had really great results. If you're listening, Mike, thank you because it really did help me out. And then the other cars that I have are a variation of different weathering techniques. There's no right or wrong. I mean, it just depends on what you're trying to accomplish on what kind of media you're gonna use. I'm a big fan of pan pastels because you can get a lot of good things coming out of those. But if you're just really wanting to streamline it and you have an airbrush, you can just hit them with a little bit of dust, a little bit of brown pan pastel on the trucks, paint the wheels, paint the couplers and you're going. Like I said, these cars are fleet cars. They're just to make the train not look like it's fresh out of the box. Another good thing to use on these cars is washes, but you gotta be careful on washes if you're doing them on black because the black just, it takes the color, I guess, how vivid the washes are away. So you can use those, but you're gonna wanna use more of the gray tone washes than like the browns because the browns are gonna get hidden. And then you can even use acrylic paint washes that you used with the cheap, I buy my stuff at Walmart, but wherever you buy it from. The cheap craft paints work good too in washes, especially if you're starting out because if you don't like what you're seeing before it dries, you can wash it off and you never ruin your car. This train just goes to show what you can do with a little amount of money, a little bit of time and a little bit of skill. And by little bit of skill, I mean, this is basically big inner stuff. There's not a single car in this train that was over $15. And as you can tell, it pretty much pulls off the effect that you wanted to get out of it. So that's kind of what we wanted to show you today is a little bit of money time and effort can have great rewards. Man, Jason, I really appreciate the fact that you came over here and brought this train today. Just the fact that every co-load looks different. All the cars have got fantastic weathering individually by themselves. It does. It exemplifies the fact that you can do it without spending a lot of money and still have very professional results. So thank you very much for sharing this with us on What's Neat. Thanks, Ken. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm doing another wintertime outdoor photo shoot here and it's pretty brisk and it was windy and I'm fighting big clouds today. Not very much sun at all. What I'm shooting today is this brand new Bachman USRA462 locomotive. And I gotta tell you what, this is a sweet little model. It comes with an LED headlight. It's got full sound. It's got that sound value sound in it that Bachman offers. And I set up the soundtracks diorama, the ash pit that you saw me make on What's Neat a couple months back. And I put a couple Bachman buildings in the background just to do a little cross-selling, the old Plasticville Coaling Tower. How well you all remember that from when we were kids modeling. That building's been around forever. But this is a really beautiful engine. I'm real happy with the way it looks and it's gonna shoot pretty decent even with the cloudy skies today. Let me show you the ad shot that I got from this shoot today. It's just decent. I kicked up the reds and the yellows in Photoshop so it wouldn't be so dark. And all the black ballast is so characteristic of a steam shot from the era. So let's do this. Let's take this model inside and let's run it through its paces and see how the thing runs out of the box on the layout. I'm pretty sure what we'll do is we'll probably set up the quatering of the locomotive because I know those usually aren't set up out of the box. But let me show you how to do that. So let's take this inside and see what it'll do next. So I brought our model inside now to test run it on the layout. And the power block that I've got here should power right up. And it does and we've got our sound. And the first thing you'll notice right out of the box is the quatering is not set. So we wanna set up this decoder and that's really easy to do by setting and programming CV 116. So I'm gonna go in the programming mode here and set CV 116. And I don't know what it's set for right now. So I'm gonna set it at 30, let's say 50 right now and see what that puts us, hit exit and let's see what it does for quatering. What I wanted to do is chuff four times for each revolution of the drivers. I've got about three and a half right there. So I'm gonna set it again, go back into the programming mode and let's set CV 116 for 75. Let's see what that does. So that's what I'm doing here right now. I'm setting it for 75, push enter, exit the system and let's see what happens now. So I set CV 116 to 73 and that quaters the wheels perfectly on this locomotive. The next thing I wanna do is I wanna set CVs three and CVs four to about say 50 on each one of those CVs. And by doing that, I'll add just a little bit of delay so that when I start up the locomotive, it'll start up nice and slow as if it's gonna be pulling a heavy load. I like to set my CVs three and four with a lot of delay on almost all of my locomotives simply because it gives a really nice operational effect to the model. So now when I start up the locomotive, it should start up slow and it does and it runs really nice. This is out of the box. Now we've pretty much set up the CVs at this point to make it run smooth out of the box. One, two, three, four. So there you go. This is a pretty nice locomotive. Thank you very much for Bachman for creating such a nice model in the value line, sound equip line of locomotives that they sell. And that's this quick little locomotive, photo shoot and review and kind of overview on what's neat of this beautiful brand new locomotive. This USRA Light Pacific, what a nice model. With Richard Rand looking at his beautiful ON30 layout. Richard, what's the name of your layout? Mineral and South Fork Railway. Okay, and this is a really large, beautiful layout. I've got some great video of it while I was looking at it here. Tell me about how long have you been working on this? Bought the house from my father 10 years ago. He had started in HOHON3 here and moved in, took care of them and then changed it over to ON30 from HO. So yeah, used some of his bench work but after that worked really hard for about five years and then ended up in the model train business again and didn't have to work too hard lately. Now I see a lot of ON30s are a lot of Bachman equipment on here. Yes. They've kind of really expanded that ON30 line. That is the majority of the equipment as I've scratch built a few things. Well, was that one of the incentives that you got into it? Was that the availability then of the equipment being? The price and availability. Isn't that nice? Isn't that nice? I see the mountains. I see you've created the cable system to get the ore out of the mines. I mean, you have spent how many hundreds of hours, I guess. Good question. I don't know. Do you spend an equal amount every week on it or is this something that you delegate time to? I used to do a lot better at it, unfortunately, again, because it's Berkshire Valley models. I don't have the time that I used to be able to spend on it. Okay, so you have this company called Berkshire Valley Models. You're also one of the principals of microengineering. I do the design. So you actually are a good example of somebody who's in the industry working full time, but yet you still have time to find something to model and enjoy. Yes. It's a blessing because there's so many people that can't do that. When our hobbies become a business, it just takes away from everything. So it's a blessing that you'll be able to find the light to be able to do what you do here and still enjoy your business and it all works. So that's a really neat thing. Yes, it's enjoyable. I love designing this, particularly getting the building and it can be a big burden, but especially scratch-building. So a lot of your buildings are scratch-built, I imagine, because there's not much available in the scale, really. Well, you do your O-scale. So there are quite a few O and, I guess, manufacturers who cater to the O and three market but could be used in O and three-scale structures. Yes. I know he makes O-scale stuff, Stony Creek. Stony Creek. Makes some beautiful kids. Banta. Banta. Oh, beautiful stuff, okay. Well, Richard, man, thank you for giving me a few minutes of time and showing us your beautiful layout on what's neat. You bet, thanks. Hi, I'm George from Soundtracks and I wanted to show you one of the cool new features we built into the Sonami 2 diesel decoder, head-end power, or HEP mode. Head-end power was when the diesel engine was artificially notched up higher to keep the main generator running at a faster rate to generate more electricity. And the electricity was used to keep the passenger cars powered with electricity for lights, air conditioning units, kitchen equipment, all of that was run off the HEP. Well, in many cases, the RPM was artificially increased and the EMDF-40PHs were typically nicknamed little screamers because when they were running at notch eight, they would sit at the depot and everybody heard the prime mover notched up all the way to notch eight. Well, we've done this in our decoders and in our HEP mode, which is function 16, you can enable it and your locomotive will go into HEP mode. For the example, the locomotive we have here, a P42, the GE typically would run to notch six and where the cool part of our HEP mode is the dynamic digital exhaust or the DDE processor takes over. So if your locomotive needs more power in the case of the F40PH, the diesel engine will intensify as it starts to need more energy. In the case of the P42, the diesel engine can notch up and also gain intensity if the more power is needed and then as less power is needed, the prime mover will drop but because it's in HEP mode, it will never drop below notch six. So that's how HEP mode works. Let's hear it real quick on how this works. You'll hear the alarm bell as it kicks into HEP mode and then you're gonna hear the prime mover notch up. You need to keep in mind about HEP mode is typically when you had multiple locomotives in a conscious together, the engineers obviously didn't want their unit in HEP mode so they would instigate HEP mode into the farthest unit or the closest to the passenger cars. So now that we're in notch six, let's take it for a spin. And that's how HEP mode works in Soundtracks Tsunami II products. These are available now and in your stores and available with information at soundtracks.com.