 For this segment of What's Neat this week, I want to discuss carving foam. I do this every single day, and honest to gosh, I take for granted thinking that everybody knows the tools that you're supposed to or that work well for carving foam, so today we're going to discuss that for a few minutes. I'm working on this layout right now, and I've got a contour and smooth out this hill. And the best way I've found a rough cut is to use this rasp. This is a rasp, very similar to normal bastard rasps, except for this one's curved, it's been heated up. So you can get your hand in it, get your knuckles in it, and this is used for the heavy carving. So if I want to take down this hill, which I need to do and smooth it out, then I'll take this rasp and it takes out very large sections of foam all at once, so I can make everything match up the way it's supposed to. Then in order to do the final carving on a scene like this after I get it all smooth, is to take a Stanley small handheld shore form planer, and what this is great for is doing is smoothing contours, it's really nice to blend in scenery, and it's fast. I buy these about one every two to three months because once they get dull they really slow down, but now this one's sharp and it works good. When I'm doing my main carving on a scene, and that's after I've stacked up brand new foam and I'm ready to carve it, I always like to use these pruning saws. These are my main tools for carving foam, the pruning saws, I've got two different sizes here. I like to attach them to a very sturdy handle, and these are great for doing very quick carving, which I need to do on this hill right here. I want to take out large segments at a time, you don't have a lot of waste that way. Look at how nice that works, and then I'll go over that with the final smoothing, and then we can get the hills to blend together. Eventually this is just going to be one smooth hill with constant gradients throughout. Now I'm going to talk about some other tools that we use for carving foam. This is a hot wire cutter, I got these from Walther's, they sell them in a set of two, so you get two different sizes, a 6 inch and a 12 inch. I don't really use them for carving scenery, but for doing really heavy carving on foam these work good because they work very quickly, you get a lot of smoke, and it gives you a hard skin after you're done using it. So this is a useful tool in the event that you want to cut foam and you don't want to use the jigsaw. I really like the jigsaw the best because it works for me, but you can really create it with something like this and do some major fast cutting. That's one type of hot wire cutter. There's another cutter that I really like, and that's a small hot wire cutter, and what this is good for is as soon as you hit the button, she heats up really quick. The other day I was installing a trestle on a foam diorama. In order to make the final good cuts, I use this tool. It's a lot slower, but it's very precise. So it allows me to get in and make the cuts, for example, when I was putting the trestle, and it works really good for that. Very small detail cutter, comes with a couple different size tips, shapes, so you can do things that you couldn't ordinarily do. Another good example of using this is when I make my cuts into the sides of the diorama for installing electronics, so that everything is just the right dimensions for the plexiglass to go in with the switches on it. So, something I wanted to cover, there's another thing that I do when I'm doing major carving, where I've got lots of foam to carve. I pull out the electric battery-powered chainsaw, and I use that and just cut right through foam very quickly with that, or do the end, the tip, and just do rough cutting with the tip. Multiple tools to use that would be good for you to look into getting for yourself to make the job a lot easier, no blisters on the fingers. It just makes it all better. So that's the tip for this month's What's Neat This Week Carving Foam. Hang on, I'm doing a lot of major work to the layout right now. I'm making a lot of changes, ripping up track. And there's a project that I've got to do where I've got to have the railroad go up a grade, and I'm putting it up a grade on the wall. And if you'll remember in the old days, just 15 to 20 years ago, we would use a level, and we'd take the longest level we could find, and we'd run it up the wall and draw our straight lines the best we could. And what I'm using now, as you can see on the wall, is a red laser. And I've got it set up right now at just under a 1% grade, so I can raise some narrow-gauge track up over the top of my switch yard over here. And what's interesting about this is the fact that with this straight laser, this is not a very expensive tool. I think I picked this up from Sears a few years back, and I want to say it was $50, maybe $75, it wasn't very much money. And these things are worth their weight in gold, just for drawing the straight lines of our bench work along the walls. If you want a perfectly level bench work, it's so much better than using a level, because by the time you go down a 30-foot wall, it always seems like you're off at least a quarter of an inch. But with this laser tool, I've got my grade drawn. All I'm going to do is follow the line with a magic marker and start attaching wood to the walls, and I'm in business. So check out lasers if you haven't done that already. They're magnificent tools for us model railroaders for doing our bench work. There's times when you're sitting there laying in bed saying, oh, what are what Ken Patterson's doing at 3 o'clock in the morning? Well, let me show you something kind of cool I'm working on tonight. I've got a diorama set up outside, and what I'm doing, I'm sitting here working on a photograph in total darkness. I've only got the outside lights on just so I can film this segment of what's neat. But what I'm doing is I've got a flashlight here, and I've wrapped masking tape around it, and I'm recreating a photograph for soundtracks that demonstrates Rule 17. Rule 17 is where the prototype railroads have to dim their headlights when the locomotive is sitting in a siding and or a main line trains coming at the locomotive, and they have the tendency to be able to dim the headlights. And you can easily perform this function by pushing F7 on your throttle to, in fact, dim the headlights on your locomotive as per Rule 17. So I'm doing a photograph tonight to try to illustrate and demonstrate how this works. And also one other tip is you push F5 to turn off the ditch lights because you don't want to blind the other locomotive that's coming at you. So what I've got here is I've set up a scene outside where I've got the Union Pacific locomotive coming right at, sitting on the siding as the Amtrak train is running past. And I took this flashlight with the tape wrapped around the lens like this, and I was able to just direct the headlight of the Amtrak train using this flashlight wrapped in tape so that I could create the effect of the headlight of the Amtrak train being, you know, lit up, brightened up again. And at the same time, the UP train is sitting here with its headlight dimmed. So just kind of a neat thing. And here's how that photograph came out. I've actually shot a couple different takes, and this is the one that looks the best. But just in case you ever ask, I wonder what Ken's doing at 3 o'clock in the morning. This is kind of what's going on. I'm creating good segments just so you can watch during the daytime. So that's that segment. This is all I wanted to discuss on how to do Rule 17. To start this segment of what's neat this week, I want to show you something that's kind of cool. At least it's kind of neat to me. As a lot of you folks know, I modeled where I live. I built a model railroad diorama of my property and where I live here on the bluff of the Mississippi River. And this is a diorama that I've recently torn down because I've torn down a great section of my layout. But this is in fact the area where I modeled. This is where I live. I've got about, I want to say, 12 feet modeled here in HO scale. The bluff is about 150 feet high. It's 450 down in the bottom plane. And it's about 652 right at the top of my neighbor's home on his bluff. You can see that I've modeled my piece of property here. And I relied really heavily on GPS and laser meters to be able to get all the dimensions. And I also relied on Google Earth and plotted this out all on foam and then simply carved it out of the foam, copied the topography, copied the prototype pictures very exact. I had an attorney take me up in a helicopter once for one of my courtroom models and so he flew me past my property and that allowed me to see what it looked like from up in the air. But this is a real accurate description of what it's like to model as what we call one-to-one in HO scale where I'm actually modeling it exactly the way it really is. As closely as I could. And so this is what it looks like outside. Now that I've torn it all down, I'm going to section out my home, keep that section and then put the rest up in the garage and just use it for various photo shoots as time permits. But I just wanted to share this with you. This is a portion of my layout that I've recently taken out and I was really proud of it when I built it. But it takes up so much room on the insides that I'm really happy to have the open shop space now to either build some narrow gauge or to just have enough room to work on two or three projects at the same time. But this is what I wanted to share with this section of what's neat this week, the bluff that I built along the Mississippi River. I've got another great warm day for doing photography and today for this segment of what's neat this week I'm working on this bluff section again. Only today I'm trying to get some era-specific shots. I've got some Missouri Pacific F units which are absolutely perfect for the Missouri Pacific, the old DeSoto mainline that used to run through here. And my father's shot some really neat black and white shots 30 or 40 years ago on the mainline behind my house here. And so I'm just trying to recreate sort of that effect of those photographs today on this diorama. And so far I'm really liking the results. I'll show you this shot that I've got coming up here. But what I really want to talk about today and I've been requested this in the viewer email in the comment section of our video. And that is how do you specifically use the Helicon Focus? And that's a program that I picked up out of the Ukraine out of Russia on the internet and you can subscribe to it yearly or you can buy a lifetime usage license in order to use it. Again it's called Helicon Focus and what I generally do when I use that program is I'm taking my still camera that I use, you know my still digital camera and you focus through the plane. Now what does that mean? What that means is on purpose you want to set up the shot where you focus just on the background trees first or if you've got a great day with clouds and you want those clouds you focus on the background clouds first. But what you do is by focusing backwards and that's how the program works is you've got to start from back here and focus your way forward. So you'll take a picture of the trees focused here then you'll move in another foot or two and focus the point of the bluff and then you'll move in a little further and so on and so forth until you get about six good shots or seven good shots focusing through the whole plane of the shot. So let me walk you through that process. I'll shoot a photograph right now of these units. We'll look at how that came out and then we'll go inside on the computer and we'll enter the photographs into the computer and I'll show you how everything gets sandwiched together and becomes a completely, totally in focus photograph. It's as if you used a pinhole lens only everything is sharp. You don't get that fuzziness that we used to get from those old pinhole lenses that we used to make. Let's go on and I'll show you how this works. Now first I'm going to walk through this photograph and take you through the process real time of actually shooting it. I've done this a number of times on our video in the past but I've only explained it with a little bit of text. So let me put the camera into position and let me go over here and get this shot. I've got my camera set up at its lowest aperture so I'm set up for f22 and I'm going to be shooting quarter second exposures on this because the sun is just right for that. I don't have to do any reflection today because the shot's just right. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to start focusing on the furthest details away on the bluff shot and shoot through the process of six photographs as I do this. So now what I'm doing is I'm setting up my shot the camera's ready to go and I'm focused on the furthest away point. In order to know I'm starting a helicon focus shot I always put my hand in front of the camera so that I can have a point of knowing where the exposures the stacked photographs will be on my chip. So now I'm shooting the photograph focused on the furthest point and I'm actually working my way in looking at the freight cars through the lens and I'm focusing closer and closer. So I've got three shots I'm at four shots and I'm focused right on the number boards right now and then I'm going to focus two more pictures on the foreground bushes I'm right here and now I'm at the bushes closest to the camera and that gives me the shots that I need. So what we're going to do now is we're going to go inside feed these into the computer and I'll show you how quick this process goes it's very simple and very fast. Okay, I've come inside now and I've loaded the chip from the camera into the computer and what I want to do is I want to open up the helicon focus it's called Helicon Focus 6 here on my screen the program opens up and it asks me what file would I like to choose and I want to go to open images here and I'm looking for there they are and there's our Pacific shots we just shot I'm going to pick one, two, three, four, five, six, seven images and I'm going to open them and here's what the shot looks like blurred what I'm saying is this is what the shot looks like where it's out of focus and it's not a very good shot as you can see from this image on the screen right now now what I want to do is I want to simply have I've got all these files uploaded into the system I want to hit the little green button up here called render and now what it's doing is it's taking all the images it's sandwiching them together right before your eyes and then here's our winning shot right here it looks really good if you look through the whole thing this shot came out absolutely in focus and it looks error correct for the location and every bush from the foreground to the background and all the little details are in focus as if we used a pinhole lens so that's essentially how you use Helicon Focus pretty straightforward, pretty simple but it's magic when it comes to improving the quality of your photographs it's just an absolutely wonderful tool so if you're looking for something like this this is what I would suggest Reynolds in the studio and Dirk started a new layout an HO scale layout that runs around his bedroom that's just up the alley who wants to build something that's small enough to fit into one room and you've been working on this layout now for about six months tell us about the progression what have you done? started with the round wall and it just didn't cooperate it just was not working so I went back to the modular design it had to be in a bedroom I live kind of college style in a room and I wanted to run a train around so I also have to consider my door that opens up so that's got to be like a bridge and I just basically took everything out started over from scratch built every module had to measure everything out ran into some design flaws ran into some design problems my back part of the room those modules had to be done first because you can't move them once once you've got them so these two had to be finished first I got my dad to help me putting up some Walther's background scenes on wood put that on the wall but what I had to do in this whole thing was that I can't put something on the wall so whatever I have has to be put on something and then that has to be put on the wall and I have to keep holes and things of that nature small because we do have to sell the house later on you know this almost sounds like a what's neat this week field trip let's go take a look at what Dirk's building in his bedroom size layout New Mexico, Arizona for the desert scene I'm looking to go into a little mountainous region but I don't want giant mountains I just want calm hills the bridge scene is modeled after an area in say New Mexico where you would see a bridge that goes over a dry river bed the micro engineering girders were used we also have the Walther's bridge track which had to be done in two sections the bridge piers themselves are actually made from knock they are made out of paper the scratch built wood around the outside is a protective piece so in case when the water does rise it's going to bring down a lot of debris and that will protect the piers from getting hit the micro engineering bridges also have the micro engineering bridge feet applied to them I have a lift out section in order to gain access to my room I have door hinges underneath on both sides I don't have to use my pins because this is very tight fit all you got to do is put a hand underneath and lift straight up and it comes right out I built the layout I built this one as I do the others as a learning curve to learn the hobby and learn the craft I'm wanting to get to the prototypical stage of it but I can use this also to test equipment as I'm learning the ditch track system I now have that incorporated also so this is my learning area well Dirk this is a pretty nice layout it's just the right size for your room and for testing your equipment so thank you very much for allowing us to intrude and sharing this with us thank you for coming over and let me show it I am Ken Patterson and if you've been watching my Facebook page in the last seven days you've watched me build this diorama used for getting outdoor run-bys on video and the whole purpose of this diorama is a new video that I'm introducing to kenpatterson.com on how to build shelf layouts it's pretty much a design video and a theory on how to go about the design of shelf layouts where I show you how to work a shelf layout into a permanent home layout and then I show you how to work the same shelf layout into a 12 by 5 foot layout that would easily fit into any man's cave in this video we cover all subjects of construction which can be used in any scale but we do it in an HO scale and I happen to be using narrow gauge trains for this video where we cover the topic of building the diorama itself laying the track on the diorama we then go into the wiring the wood finish on the sides we cover the construction of four different types of structures three laser kits, we do a train station then I do show the construction of a freight depot and then I also show the construction of an engine house we also cover building a turntable an operating turntable that you operate by hand but it's fully powered so the trains can go on and off of it so in this video there's a lot of subject matter that's great for the modeler scenery, fake fur all the subjects that are necessary to build a really nice railroad layout are covered in this video so check it out at KenPatterson.com the new shelf layout video is now available for download for this segment of What's Neat we've got Michael Buddy again with something really sweet now usually Mike Buddy is always bringing over an auto rack or something special that he's made and the fact is when you look at art most artists paint on a canvas but we cannot paint on a canvas to speak in that our canvases are 3 inches high at about 35 feet long so what I thought on this would be to actually show one of Mike's entire freight trains that he's weathered and scratch built the auto racks on in its entirety with a little bit of editing to make it interesting so with that let's introduce Mike Buddy and Mike kind of tell us about your train that we're about to see and what you've done to this alright, well yeah this is a model of a dedicated auto parts train like the Ford Fast the Kansas City into Colorado so this represents a train going back to the factory with box cars full of auto parts flat frames full of auto frames and empty auto racks to be loaded up with new vehicles so there's no full loaded auto racks on here it's all parts, cars, full of parts and empty auto racks pretty impressive model man we really appreciate the fact that you share this with us so now let's enjoy that gorgeous run by