 For this What's Neat This Week, it's December 2015. We're going now into our fourth year of doing this show and we've got lots of good material coming up in the future. This month, we've got a segment on 3D printing where we explore and look at the new Dremel 3D printer and we experiment a little bit with that. And then later on in the show, we discuss layout construction. We do part two of a series that we started last month where we're gonna explore soldering, track laying, scenery, and everything else to finish off a really cool warf scene that I'm working on on my layout. But first, Joe Fugate asked that I do a story that correlates with this December's cover for Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine. And that's just a little bit of story about the photography and the photos and my career in the model railroad industry in the last 35 years. We're gonna talk about some of the photos that I've had published in the Model Press and this is gonna correlate with the introduction of two new calendars that are gonna come out that Joe is introducing. I sent him 60-something photographs and he picked 24 photographs and we've got a nice narrow gauge calendar coming out and a standard gauge calendar coming out, all model photography. Now, I was born in a home with a father that was a model railroader. I found some of the photos of his old layout in a shoebox, photos from the late 60s. He was an old school modeler and I watched him build bridges and wire screen hardshell scenery and plaster and the like. But during that time in the late 60s and early 70s, I was exposed to railfanning and I absorbed a lot of information from watching the prototype. Fast forward to 1975 and I found myself adopted by my grandparents and as a homecoming gift, I received a Tyco train set. I quickly grew from my four by eight layout to an around the room layout, using scrap wood or anything that I could just get my hands on that was in the garage to work on models. Later on, about 1981, I built this layout that was just wrapping around the whole basement. I had gotten a jigsaw and I took that saw and started cutting up plywood and you should have seen my grandfather's face when I wanted to load all this wood on top of his Ford LTD. About this time, I became interested in photography and I started using my grandfather's Pentax and me in shooting layout photos indoor on my layout, different scenarios. I used nighttime photography, I experimented with that a little bit and I also tried taking old Arizona magazines and using them for backgrounds to create some photographs. I also tried taking simple cotton and my blue jacket and putting that as a background for a sky. You know, it was about this time that I ran into the 1979 Walthers catalog photograph that Vic Roseman had done and this taught me something really, really instilled into me was depth of field and outdoors. Do your photos outdoors. So it was about this time that I started doing outdoor photography. I actually took apart parts of my layout and I also built dioramas and I knew that outdoor sunlight was the way to go. It didn't work out that great but also about this time I got in my car and I got a job at a hardware store and it wasn't just the fact that I was at a hardware store, it was a fact that I could now order my own homosote, my own lumber, my own woodwork and now we're off to the races to finish the basement and start working on a layout that really would run well and incubate and kind of teach me the skills of model railroading to improve my talents. I did finally score a realistic model railroad photo around 1986 of this creek scene with a guy fly fishing in the middle of a resin creek. I entered this in my local NMRA photo contest. A year later I moved out of my childhood home and found myself living in a small house in Webster Groves with college students as tenants. My home layout was now a six foot long shelf diorama with hand laid track, scratch built wood buildings that I would eventually photograph outdoors. I tried a few different shots here and there in a field just to see how the buildings and everything would look together. It was also at this time that I met the girl of my dreams, Michelle who was very supportive of the hobby and even participated a little bit and helped me with projects. Living on my own now, I started my own real estate company and found myself in the streets every day flipping foreclosures just to support my hobby. It was also at this time I started the Midwest Valley modelers layout, a modular club in St. Louis. This was a stackable layout with modules six feet by 28 inches wide and for the first time I used foam as scenery along with one by fours. The layout was 36 feet long with 12 modules making for a circle 51 and a half inches from the floor with head lighting all the way around, track lights which lit the scenery and added color to everything. This layout also became a platform for shooting photos outdoors in real sunlight. I found myself in the middle of cornfields many days out of each month photographing unweathered brass models on the layout like this shot of a Rock Island steam locomotive running up the main line with cotton as smoke or this SP consist running through the interchange module or this Amtrak California Zephyr running across the creek module. The yard shot was a great place to shoot colorful locomotives and rolling stock all in groups. The engine service facility made for some great shots like this NNS photograph of one of Jim Napoli's models. This canary Missouri Pacific locomotive is getting fuel at the fuel and service facility on the layout. Realistic scenery made the stage for this stunning Rock Island photo with hikers in the bush or this sunset brass Santa Fe consolidation pulling a freight through acres of fake fur with a lone passenger riding in the boxcar. I always wondered where this guy was going and I can tell you he's still here running around on my layout. Now we're about 1997 and this is when I really changed my life because I met Michael Buddy. Now what Mike did for me is he taught me about oil paint weathering and I was no longer shooting unfinished clean brass models. Now I was shooting models that were weathered on the layout like this Bachman photograph, an ad for a manufacturer where all the models are completely weathered realistic. It's the way I also did when Lifelike was purchased by Walthers and we had a submission of many diesel shots for publication and ads and those models were all weathered as well. So it was Mike that really changed things for me and allowed me to learn how to make my models that much better. It was also in 1997 that I closed my real estate company. Not that I was going broke but I wanted to pursue my passion. So I put on a suit and I went to trade shows and I started soliciting the manufacturers at these trade shows to show them my work to see if I could actually turn this into a business and fast forward 18 years and wearing that suit and going to these trade shows did support and create a business of sorts to the point where I've been shooting photographs now for many manufacturers for Walthers, for Atlas, I've been doing Bachman photos. I can't even remember all the people that I've worked with. The most recent ones that you've seen are Athens, just some stunning photography I've done for them. But as you look around the room here, you'll see I've got a lot of the covers hanging up and I use them more or less as a menu to help me know what kind of shots work quick when I'm trying to create something fast and also it's a good way for me just to reminisce on a lot of good memories. Let's look at this one shot, the 2002 Walthers cover and let's talk just a little bit about that shot for a minute. My assignment was to take the cover of the Hunman publication, Alleghenies, Lima's Finest and mirror it so that the engine is running towards the opening of the book. Phil Walthers personally flew his private plane to St. Louis to deliver the pre-production models fresh from Italy. He spent a few hours in the bluff giving me instructions for the photo and pretty much just giving us a break from the normal routine. I laid the scene nine feet long on a few sheets of foam with supporting scenery to match the book's cover. I soaked bags of lichen to form the Allegheny Mountains onto foam. I then set all the props up outside and shot photos over a period of a month in between stormy days until I captured the essence on film of this mighty model working the grade in all of its glory. Another cool shot that is one of my favorites is the shot I did for Atlas. I use both HO scale and N scale models to create the effect of the train's rear cars curving back into the scene at a distance. I've always had good luck at painting backdrops like this Bachman N scale photograph with the train pulling itself through snow. Another interesting photo is this derailment photograph where the crane was the product to sell so I put one of Bachman's best K4s in the dirt just to be rescued by the train crew. Everyone remembers the Bachman Easy Track ad. It has been running in the model press for 15 years shot in 2000. I always thought the title for this ad should have been From the Carpet to Your Imagination. Easy Track will take you there. It's when I came up with the idea of making large bodies of water on foam that I landed the Walther's Ordoch project and then the Lift Bridge project which led to the Swing Bridge photographs and more recently a BLMA Bridge photograph which has been featured in previous What's Neat videos. There have been so many cool projects that I could go on for hours. Let me end this short overview of my work by saying pick up one of my new calendars. In it, I will share with you inspiring photographs each month, both in narrow gauge and standard gauge available at the Model Railroad Hobbius Magazine store online. Since it's December, let me end with one of my favorite Christmas shots that I did for mainline modeler in 2004. It captures the feel of a cold Christmas Eve night and will forever be one of my most favorite shots. For this segment of What's Neat, we're gonna take a peek at the new technology that is 3D printing with this new Dremel 3D printer. The Dremel 3D printer came in a nice box. Well packed, the box was a presentation by itself only adding to the excitement of working with this new tool. It was wrapped in plastic and everything you needed to make the unit work was packed in the foam. The power cord, the USB cable, a nozzle clean out tool and a spatula. I installed the spool of printing filament in the unit with the spool feeding from the bottom towards the back. After threading the line through the filament guide, it was ready to be fed into the printer's extruder head when the machine is turned on. Upon powering up the unit, the first procedure is to level the printing table. This is done by pressing the level key on the touch screen. The table then moves into position. The touch screen walks you through the procedure of leveling the table to the printhead in three locations. You use the supplied gap tool, which is about three millimeters thick, similar to gapping a spark plug. You want this to fit just between the table's head as you slide it between the space. There are adjustment knobs under the printer's platform that raise or lower those table, aiding in this process. First, let's build something from the machine's internal memory, the Rhino head. Press build and you see the head's temperature rise for the one hour, six minute print time. When the head's temperature reaches 218 degrees, the 3D print process begins with the table moving into position and the printhead finding its location to start laying filament, which is about the thickness of a human hair, layer over layer over layer. Let's watch as the printer makes the Rhino head in about an hour condensed down to less than 30 seconds. Peace from the printer's table. The part came out clean with smooth lines. Along with the Rhino head, I also printed a toy school bus. The parts felt solid as the printer made an internal webbing that added strength to the semi-hollow toys. Now it was time to connect the USB cable to the printer and power up the laptop computer to download Dremel 3D software from Dremel3D.com. We will use this software to size a model downloaded from the internet to any scale that we want. The Dremel 3D ID Builder website has many items that you can download and print. Clicking on the entertainment, page four, I found a highway construction barrel to print. I downloaded this barrel to the laptop and scaled it from one inch tall down to about one half inch tall for HO scale using the Dremel software. Now I was ready to print. Move the pointer to the build icon, click and you will get a screen giving resolution options. I chose standard. Click okay and the file is loaded to the printer as you will see the head's temperature heating up and the two minute print time for this barrel displayed. When the printer's head reached 218 degrees, the two minute printing process began. The barrel is almost complete as we view the head printing the top detail. When finished, the head and the platform move into position giving us access to remove the newly printed part. Here you see two printed highway construction barrels next to an HO scale figure. Pretty cool. I'd like to design a small storefront in HO scale for my layout and a future show we will explore the process of creating this storefront building using the design program SketchUp which is available online. So the new Dremel 3D20 Idea Builder print machine is really an impressive simple to use versatile machine and in reality it only took about 20 minutes from unboxing the unit to setting it up to printing my first item on the internal memory. So it was very intuitive, very easy to use and I know just in time for Christmas, this would be a great gift to buy yourself so that you could build models for your model train layout, any scale that you want by simply designing them in a CAD software program or downloading them from the internet. So check it out, something to think about this Christmas, the Dremel 3D Idea Builder. Motion tips. This is gonna be part two from where we left off last month and that was where I was working on a warp scene on my layout where I'm replacing a lot of areas here that I've worked on in the past. So we're gonna test starting to put out the gray, getting the gradient, carving it and sealing all the foam with latex paint. Well now I'm to the point now of cutting a hole in the side panel here to put in the electrical and run block switches to each one of the tracks so I can turn off the power. I've also got the tracks sort of laid out in an area where I'm pretty sure it's gonna go now. I have not glued it down yet. I'm still test fitting everything and I'm adapting everything to fit where the building is gonna be on the scene. So what we're gonna do next is we're gonna go over and we're gonna put the plywood on the scene, cut the plywood and give a really nice edge to the whole diorama and then we can glue down the track, wire everything up and then start ballasting and fake furring and finishing the area so that it's ready for structures and buildings and details like that. So we're gonna go over all of those steps real quick in this part two series of layout construction. The key to cutting out control panel mounts is that when I do that, I use a spiral drill bit so that I'm able to when I go around the piece of material, the bits got teeth all the way around it on all sides and therefore it's easy to cut out the circles that I need, plus the blade itself has got just enough thickness of teeth on it where I don't get melted plastic. Everything doesn't melt together. So it's just one way that I like to do this for cutting out the plexiglass circles for the rocker switches to fit into. And as you can see, I can go all the way around. I don't have to move the workpiece. I don't have to turn the workpiece. All I've got to simply do is allow the saw blade to follow the pencil line I've got drawn and then I'll go in and I'll file out the hole just to be the right perfect size to fit the rocker switch. And that's how I cut my holes for my panels. After filing the holes to a perfect size for the switches to fit, I applied tape in the track pattern of the area to the backside of the panel and I did this backwards. Then I painted the backside of the panel black. Upon removing the tape, the unpainted areas were clear to see. I then sprayed gold paint over the back of the panel creating a gold track pattern as would be viewed from the front of the panel. These things look really nice to dress up the room and the sides of the layout. I then figured a spot to place the panel on the side of the layout in relation to where each of the four tracks were. And then I started carving this area to fit the wires and the panel flush into the foam. I'm using a hot foam cutter to cut out a space that's exactly the same size as the plexiglass panel we just made so that I can fit all the electronics inside this cavern that we're making with the hot foam cutter. Then the panel's gonna rest right in here with all the switches on it. And of course all the wires are gonna run from here to one, two, three, four tracks all the way across. So that's the plan at this point is to finish carving this out, get the panel rocker switches in here and run a wire lead to each one of the tracks for the blocks. I like to use these radio shack rocker switches. They're flush mount three quarter inch holes. And the reason I like these is when they go into the panels and the panels are mounted on the layout, these switches fit flush. I've seen far too many situations where modelers or friends have come by and they'll hit, they'll rub their coats or their jackets up against the edge of the layout and I've had other switches that stick out, just toggle switches and I've had the tops of them broken off or I've actually had complete control panels literally just pulled out. But what'll happen here is this will be flush with the plywood that's gonna laminate the diorama so there'll be no chance of anybody catching or rubbing anything, but at the same time they work perfect for what we want to use them for. Okay, I've got my rocker switches in the panel and I'm gonna run a common wire to the bottom of each one of these connectors here, just a brass wire so you have electricity and that wire's gonna run off to the hot wire, the positive lead of the layout. And then what I'm gonna do is the top brackets here, the top to solder on that, the wires are gonna run from the rocker switches to each one of the tracks and that's the track that will be able to be shut off when we kill the switch. I'm soldering my common wire on with just a little bit of rosin solder here and a pencil tip iron. So this will be the wire that give me the power for the entire block and it runs all the way through like I said before. Now what I need to do is come off of the layout and attach the wires to each one of the switches and let me show you how we're gonna do that. You've gotta ask yourself, well how is it that I drill a hole in foam to run my wires to each rail that we're gonna use for blocks because you can't really take a drill bit and drill through foam because the foam collapses again. Well what I like to do and what I'm gonna show you how to do here right now is you take a brass tube, they're stiff for the spot where your electrics are gonna be and on my layout it's always the inside rail that I gap and I use for my block wires. So I'm gonna come from the inside rail and I'm gonna simply aim and I've had great results with this up to eight or 12 inches. Sometimes I like to put a block of wood on the end to help facilitate your hand pressure if you don't stab yourself. But if you aim for the location, it'll pop right out the bottom just like we want it to. Watching it real time here for me. Now I've got the tube all the way through which provides a conduit through the foam so the foam does not collapse in on the hole and then I can take my wire and run it right here all the way through the tube and it doesn't have to go all the way through just far enough to reach this area where we want the wire to be. I think that's right there. Then you pull the tube out and here's my wire ready to be soldered onto this track right here and then the other wire here will be soldered onto this block, the bottom one right here. So I'll simply strip the wire and solder that onto here and I just need to do that ditto one, two, three, four to finish the rest of the switches here for the electrical. Here's another one I just sank in. I'm gonna cut the wire, pull out my tube and take this under the wire and simply solder it onto this terminal just a little bit of heat. I've only got one more to go now. Okay, so the power that's gonna power up all of our blocks inside of our control panel area, I'm coming off of that right here on this turnout because this is gonna be hot all the time. This gets continuous power from the main line of the layout so I don't have to worry about continuity or ever having that off. So this is gonna be my hot lead to run into the panel area and I'm fishing my wire through right now and that should end up coming through right down here in the hole just like that. Cut the wire on top up here and then I need to pull out the tube. Still have the wires stay in place. So I'm ready now to strip off my lead here and go ahead and solder this wire onto the turnout right here. And the other wire, the other end here is the one that's gonna be soldered to the main heavy wire I've got running to all the switches. So I'll be able to just intertwine that inside of here like this, like that, just a little bit of this solder, just like that. And now our panel will be hot. It's got main power coming in, all the little block wires, all four of them going out. And at this point, I can go ahead and glue this into place now because we are completely, completely finished with the wiring on that, just like that. That's completely upside down. Okay, how about just like that? I always like to use a pair of tweezers to hold my electrical contact wire when I solder it. So I put the gorilla glue around the outside edge of the control panel where it's gonna mount and touch the foam and wet the surface. And now I'm wetting the surface one more time. This will all dry. The key to keeping this in place while the gorilla glue expands is using these long push pins which will keep it into position, want it to stay as the foam sets up over the next 25 minutes. Now that I've got all the track lead into position, I'm simply soldering together all of it. This ensures that nothing's gonna move when I glue everything down. Everything's gonna stay right where I want it to. It's sort of like a piece of stained glass. When you solder it all together, you get great continuity for electricity. Plus you've got a sturdy structure. So I'm just gonna go through all of this track work. There's nine joints on each turnout to solder. Plus the wire leads, I'm gonna solder those. Curves in the position. Everything's gonna be rigid. I'm using a knife point soldering tip for this. It's giving me a flat, even heat so I don't have to touch the part very long at all. I've got a lot of rarotized root place where my joints are to put underneath to fill in. Because all the foam is sealed with latex paint, this allows me to use liquid nails to glue the track down. Which makes the track very, very permanent. It's very difficult to reuse track after you've put it down with liquid nails. Another thing you can try to do is silicone. That works, but silicone, nothing really sticks to silicone. It's difficult to get ballast to stick to silicone. So I've been using liquid nails and it's tried and true and it doesn't take very much to hold very tight. I don't put any liquid nails around the switch points or any of the moving parts of the turnouts. It's not necessary. If you can get the liquid nails about every six inches of trackage, you're fine with that. It'll still hold it down a lot. And I'm not gonna put liquid nails down and glue the final section coming into where the building's gonna set because I don't know exactly the distance of the trackage yet. And I wanna leave that option open. Turning my attention to the sides of the layout, I routered a three-quarter inch groove to accept blocks of wood that I could use to attach the plywood to the sides of diorama with. I'll use staples and I'll staple this right into those blocks of wood. I sealed this groove with latex paint just to make sure I wouldn't have any problem with foam shrinkage. I cut a strip of one-quarter inch plywood for the side of the layout, matching the contours. I used the jigsaw and I started cutting the edge on top of the plywood and matched the contours that I traced onto the plywood. And then I also had to cut the opening for the switch panel to be able to show through. I sanded the wood sides very smooth with 120 grit sandpaper. I then stained the sides of the plywood with, I used red oak stain on this. It matches the color of my interior of my studio. And then I put three coats of polyurethane over this sanding in between coats so I'd get a glass smooth finish. I then fit and attach the wood to the sides of the scene. I'm putting on the plywood side of the diorama. This is Gorilla Glue to help me attach it so I spray a little water on everything. I'm just a little Gorilla Glue here to staple this also onto the sides. With the wood it's already in the woodwork. I also cut off about a foot of the layout on the other end of the bridge module and covered this with a new piece of stained plywood giving the layout an even curvature that flowed really well when viewed overall. Turning my attention to finishing the visual scenery I cut the fake fur in sections to fit in the spaces where wild grass would grow between the tracks. I glued the fake fur in place using Great Stuff Foam Pro and pressing this in with my hands. This set up very quick and glued the fake fur permanently. I trim the fake fur into random tall grass looking patterns with a barber shear. The random part here is very important. I painted the fake fur grass with a can of spray paint actually alternating between forest green and hunter green giving the whole area a very good green look. I applied backyard dirt sifted through a screen onto the fake fur in the surrounding areas around the track. And then I worked this dirt in with a hair brush kind of just brushing back and forth so the fake fur tuffs would stand up and the dirt would settle down between the grass tuffs giving a good area later where we'll put ground foam. I applied dirt, ballast and rip wrap onto the scene using a fan brush to spread the ballast over the track area clean smooth along with the dirt and the rip wrap the same way. I also applied woodland scenic ground foam around the track areas, the fake fur areas husing two different colors, medium green and light green. This helped blend the fake fur scenery around in the track areas. Once all the dirt, rock, ballast and ground foam was in place I sprayed the entire scene with two bottles of woodland scenic scenic cement permanently gluing everything into place solid but leaving the ground foam feeling soft. I used sill floor grass tuffs to further detail the track areas gluing each tuft one at a time with Elmer's white glue. Using a spray bottle full of scenic cement and a knock static gun, I added random areas of green static grass around the track. All of this various vegetation works good together to make the scene visually believable and further helps to blend the scenery where the fake fur edges and the dirt come together. I still needed to add bushes and trees as time permits but this pretty much finishes this section of the layout with the BTS Hyde Pult Mill 95% complete along with the Wood Dock Warf. All of the scenery elements come together making this a new signature scene on my layout for photography and video as well as adding additional switching operations for the trains in both standard gauge and narrow gauge.