 This is what's neat for July 2016. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month John Tyson comes by and shows us some magnificent RC vehicles and HO scale that just drives smooth. Also this month for tool tips we talk about crimpers, a vital tool for DCC installation when you're running your local net around your layout. Also that we do a photography segment this month featuring new N-scale passenger cars from Bachman. We shoot them in a nighttime scene with a full moon and it really made for an interesting looking photograph. Also we talk with Craig Bischgeier this month who is building a beautiful turn of the century layout and he shares parts of that layout with us for this interview. Also we look at and listen to the new Sonami 2 decoder. Now I've been working on my layout a lot and adding a lot of trees and making the scenery look just right to create some new videos for soundtracks featuring the new Sonami 2 line of decoders. And this month we look at the diesel decoder. It is just a magnificent new decoder. I'm telling you it's a great segment this month and that's what we've got this month for what's neat. You caught me doing some wiring on the layout. These Digitrax modules on the layout that you plug in for your local net. They call it a local net and that's the system that talks to the handheld throttles when they're plugged in so that you can program your decoders online. And they run their system. Digitrax runs their system through a six wire phone cable which I'm tethering these and running these around. But the subject of today is not about how to wire these. It's really about the tool tip and the tip on a tool that you really need is a crimper. At some point when you're doing DCC and you're working with your your local net or whatever I don't remember what other manufacturers call that but a crimping tool is a wonderful tool to have and what this does is it takes the phone connectors that we purchase. You can get these online or get these at Radio Shack. This is a six connector phone jack and that's what plugs into the face panel when you plug your wires in and as you see I've got one I just mounted right down here underneath the layout and so that's the one that I'm about to wire up. And let me show you how this tool works. It's a really slick easy to use tool. It does two things. It cuts the wire and then it crimps the attaching connector to the end of the wire and splices into all six wires at the same time. So the first thing I want to do is cut my wire off clean and I use a side that says cutter. I make a nice clean cut on the wire here just like that and then I want to use the other side that says stripper and that's right here and that's going to strip all six wires at the same time when I put it in there. Straight out and there's all six of my wires ready to be connected to the system. Now let me show you how this works. You take the clear little six connector and put it into the crimp tool and in this case it's a six and eight pin crimp tool so with eight pins I know other DCC manufacturers use eight pins. Digitrax uses a six. Now that the connector is inside of the device as you can see now I'm simply going to take the wire and insert the wire into the crimp tool just like that and I'm going to crimp down tight, squeeze it and that will attach all six wires to our connector. We can then plug it into the Digitrax faceplate and in my case because I'm wiring it up underneath the layout right here I'm going to be plugging it into one of the rear jacks just like this and because all my bench work is metal studs I can run the wires right through metal studs as I daisy chain these local net wires all the way around on the layout and so I'm going to plug this one in right here and this one is finished and connected to the system and again I'm just running right through the steel gutters when I do this or the steel of studs is what they are but that's tool tips now in the event that after you've crimped your tools together your wires together another thing I like to use are these connectors to connect two lines to splice two lines together at the same time and the other device I like to use that you look for you can find these on eBay you can find them at the Home Depot is a splitter and it's a six wire splitter so then I can come from one wire and split into two by simply you know press and fit parts it just works so that's the tool tip really look into this the crimper tool because you will need one of these at some point when you start wiring your own DCC so that's this month's tool tips for what's neat for this segment of what's neat I've got John Tyson again from Joliet, Illinois and this time he's brought us a magnificent RC controlled vehicles that run just as good as anything we've ever seen so I've got Mike Buddy here and John and guys why don't you tell us about these magnificent models this was just kind of a little side project of mine you know I'm a model railroader and I got an RC planes for a bit and I decided to try to combine the two and this is kind of what we came up with here just this this is my latest build this is an athern Ford f850 I believe and this one is built with parts from micro model bow dot yeah it's a website in German so you're gonna have to translate it to figure out what you're buying here but this this is a pretty straightforward build it's ready to run gear box the axle the front axle suspension this is all from a faller car system and this is all sold on that website so this is basically kind of a you know out of the box you know as simple as it can be you know and then you've got lights in it yeah and fiber optics for the clearance lights yeah it's fully lit that shows up yes it does from here anyway I think there's maybe 10 leds on there total boy boy that truck runs really smooth the parts are available from micro model bow dot DE now what parts do you need to make one of these trucks run um well I'm using third gear box it's a small 7 millimeter cordless motor attached to a to their own gearbox they're available in different gear ratios don't remember which one I used 30 to 1 possibly I'm using their speed controller a deltang receiver which I believe you get from there as well and then just a micro servo and a couple lipo batteries I you know got a nice big box here so I got some big batteries and yeah some longer on time you know these these smaller guys you know maybe get 15 20 minutes out of these but that thing should run for quite some time is it hard to get the roof off of that no show show the inside of it it's kind of hard to see through all the fiber optics for the clearance lights but that's you got a lot of room to work inside there right I'd like to see this running in the dark and see what the lights look like in the dark wow that is really cool in the dark those lights show up really well the clearance lights everything that is awesome so what do we have inside of this VW bus here all right well this one was more of a custom build as opposed to the athern truck this one's all brass constructed steering the drive is just a motor with a worm and a gear this isn't this is something I built this isn't something you can make that you got to make this yourself 256 screw yeah exactly although you can buy miniature gears like this on that micro model of our website and just a tiny lipo same thing I'm using the same speed controller as the athern same steering servo and same receiver just in a small package all right let's see how this one runs okay boy these things really run great nice parallel parking job by the way and that's these the way RC is really advancing it's just amazing how smooth and it's it just blows me away I don't know what to say the lights the headlights tail lights you know backup lights it's just that's unbelievable thank you thank you no thanks so much for coming down here making the trip down here to get with us on what's neat this week I hope to see you back again thanks for having me all right yeah all right cool see you for this photography segment of what's neat I'm shooting some n scale today a lot of folks that asked me how come I never do n scale on the show and I don't really get that many projects but today I've got some pre-production beautiful Bachman Pennsylvania passenger cars and I'm shooting and I've set up the old Walthers 2006 cover diorama and I'm using that because it's got some beautiful code 55 microengineering track on it it's just a great looking diorama and let me show you the photograph that I just got today I was just shooting a photograph that focuses primarily on the passenger cars and I wanted to put just a little bit of the Pennsylvania GG1 in n scale in the background now my guess is that these passenger cars probably have lights in them and so what I want might want to do here is rather than just do my typical standard outdoor photograph with these I might try and experiment tonight and that's the whole purpose of this video I think I'm gonna do an indoor shot with these because these cars probably more than likely do have lights in them I don't know I haven't put on on the track yet most of the stuff I get is generally pre-production so there's no instruction books or anything written for the stuff that I shoot because I'm getting it usually about three months ahead of time that it makes market so to do this shoot today I think what I'm gonna do is take this inside and do a nighttime shot with it like these passenger cars up and if they've got lights in them this would be a successful video because I think I'm gonna put up a moon a few buildings light up the buildings and just do a real quick indoor shot using four or five props and the diorama that I've got set up here and maybe I can get a really cool lit shot of these cars it focuses just on the cars but still has just a little drama with maybe a full moon and just whatever I can set up on the inside quickly to do a nice shoot so let's see what happens on this project if this works out inside this could be a very interesting photo shoot so we've come indoors now to shoot the Bachman n-scale passenger cars in a nighttime setting using this diorama that I've gotten set up here and I died a thousand deaths thinking about the scene and how it should be set up and in reality when I started putting things together it only took 15 minutes and I started shooting pictures now the scene is lit with some LED lights inside the building all buildings have a small puck light in them the passenger cars are hooked up to DCC I'm still using the same diorama that the Walthers 2006 cover was shot on and I've got the full moon that I painted for the old Blackstone Christmas shot hanging on the wall and I've got a lamp on the floor and what I do is I turn this lamp on for 40 seconds during the exposure and the first picture that I set up and shot I lit the passenger cars I had all the room lights off and I lit the buildings and I let this be lit for one segment of 10 minutes while the camera was left open and then during that 10 minutes I turned on the light to light up the moon for 30 seconds and then I used a flashlight and I took a flashlight from the end of the room and reflected it just off the edge of the cars so the cars would have just a little silver reflection on them and then let me show you the results I got from this and then by studying this photograph and looking at this I could see a couple of problems first in the background the building lights from the building were reflecting on the moon's background and also the passenger cars quite honestly were too lit so 10 minutes was way too long so I sit up and I shot a second exposure and the plan was to try to get it right this time and so what I did with the scene was I had the exposure down to three minutes where the passenger cars in the buildings were lit I increased the moon's lighting value with the lamp on the floor to 45 seconds and the flashlight that I trained on the side of the cars I limited that to literally one or two seconds it was a very quick pan shot with a flashlight and now let me show you what I got from that after doing those corrections here I can show you what the final photograph looks like something just totally different absolutely stunning looking in a way and these are the new Bachman and scale passenger cars with lights in them so I think it's a great way to display the product so that's this photography segment for what's neat for this segment of what's neat I've got a really special guest with me Craig Bischkeier now I met Craig about four years ago when I started doing this video show we got the idea the concept even from doing video and Craig actually taught me how to use Skype and so this evening I've got Craig on the computer here say hi Craig and I see a pretty neat looking layout behind you Craig I know a lot of the guys know you from the Scotty Mason show your name is on an awful lot of different podcasts it's just neat when you hear podcasts and you hear the name Craig Bischkeier just out of the blue as a segue between segments this is Craig but he's a very amazing modeler when it comes to Civil War era early turn of the century modeling which is right up the alley with the new Bachman 4 4 O's that we're eventually gonna have on the show and do feature on that but Craig tell us a little bit about your cool stuff that you do oh well let's see basically what I'm modeling is the year 1892 so a little bit beyond the Civil War but model a railroad called the Busatonic Railroad which was a precursor to part of the New Haven system and eventually became the Berkshire Division of the New Haven and I modeled it from South Norwalk Connecticut up to about past Danbury and a little farther up towards the Milford it's a nice railroad that I really enjoy it's got a little rail marine interface so there's a car flows down on the land it's a double deck railroad that runs around the basement without a helix and I don't know it's not much else to really say but we have a lot of fun with it can you move that laptop around it gives us a little view of the room or anything like that well I can try I'm I gotta warn you it's a little messy right now I haven't really had a chance to clean up and doing a lot of work on future projects and I tend not to clean up a whole lot while I'm doing a lot of work but yeah I can probably show you a couple to be fair to Craig I just literally called him on Skype moments ago and this is an unrehearsed we didn't even know we were gonna talk about anything but he's got so much fascinating stuff behind him that I really kind of wanted to get a glimpse into his world and that's what we're doing right now let's see so right here is a building called the Huyton Olmsted cigar factory this is actually built by a friend of mine named David Emery who's another outstanding model and there's a couple of other models in the background which some of what your ones I've done some of which are ones that have been done by friends and a number of freight cars here in the front that are different projects I've worked on over time some are kit badges some are actually laser-cut kits some of them that I've developed myself and there's also just some plastic kits here and there the building in the back there you can probably see is the South Norwalk Ironworks which is a project that I worked on with a gentleman named Neil Henning and we had a lot of fun with that we built that about 10 years ago moving on here this is the freight house in South Norwalk which again built by Neil which was a lot of fun that's you know pretty much nice little view of South Norwalk right there let's see if I can flip this around a little bit and show you a little bit of Wilson point this is a kind of a neat scene and I again apologize that it's not that clean but this is a rail marine section that I was telling you about nice yeah that's beautiful right this is where the railroad came down to Long Island Sound and they would load cart onto car floats and ferries in order to bring them to New York City and they were competing very heavily with the New Haven at the time so this is this was a very busy area in the area and a lot of fun to operate on let me just pan over here and show you a little bit I hope this is working out okay it's kind of hard to keep the camera focused there's a scratch built roundhouse back there which matches the new Raven prototype most of the stuff here actually came from photos and valuation maps of things that we found for the period there's a station that's in progress being built right there which was actually a station that was on your Wilson point your boats look amazing yeah thanks some of them are obviously under construction oh this I love that that is very interesting because now you've got a part of the layout where something can just disappear and more freight cars can come back on that's exactly it that's what we use it for is a staging this is actually a staging yard on the railroad for freight and for passenger if I walk around the front here you can see that though the ferry here which is a model of a real car ferry called the Cape Charles well this is a railroad ferry and you can see there there's actually a couple of passenger cars look at it would be in the front there and we actually run a train called the Long Island in Eastern States Express out of this ferry every morning on the railroad when we do an op section which is a real train that actually operated on this part of the railroad came from Long Island across the sound to here and then up this railroad to a railroad called the New York in New England up to Boston and back again so that's actually a pretty key part of the operation in terms of passenger traffic there's also there's also here there's a car floor that was actually used to run freight back and forth through New York and New Jersey to this point in Connecticut so this actually part of it is a pretty exciting part of the railroad to run when we're actually operating Craig your layout looks absolutely amazing I really appreciate you sharing it with us on what's neat the limited amount of time that we've got for segments it seems kind of short but we saw an awful lot of neat stuff well thanks I really appreciate that Ken that's really kind of it was fun kind of you kind of push on it to you cool man well thank you very much Craig it's always my pleasure thanks for this next segment of what's neat we're gonna look at that snoo tsunami 2 decoder now I'm so excited about this product I can barely contain myself the diesel features a new diesel dynamic digital exhaust and this feature allows the locomotive itself to sense the load so when it's going upgrade on your layout you can hear the locomotive working hard on the grade and then as it coasts and comes back downhill you can hear the locomotive motor throttle back and start coasting as it goes down the grade here are two of the locomotives that I installed the tsunami 2 decoders in back in May and I had a head start working with these because I had the privilege to make a corporate video for soundtracks on both the steam and the diesel tsunami decoder and we will feature the steam locomotive and its sounds which are magnificent into themselves in the next month's video in the August what's neat video but for this month I would like to show you the video that I made for soundtracks the corporate video that illustrates a few of the features of this decoder now in a six-minute video I could not possibly cover all of the new features that are in the decoder but I highlight just a few and one of them that I think would be great for hobby shop point of presentation is to demonstrate the dynamic digital exhaust by simply allowing your train to run and hold it back and listen to the engines throttle up as you're trying to drag me in my hand through the room and then as I let go they throttle back down automatically so it's a magnificent segment of video coming up a great new product a whole new era in digital decoders from soundtracks so enjoy this video that I made for them it's about six and a half minutes about the tsunami 2 diesel decoder hi Ken Patterson with some exciting news from soundtracks introducing the new tsunami 2 line of decoders tsunami 2 is a decoder that takes scale-roaring to another level equipped with 40 air horns selectable bowels air compressors couplers and nine prime movers in each decoder it makes matching your prototype easy fully redesigned and digitally remastered by the smart engineers at soundtracks these decoders are equipped with up to six lighting outputs flexible 28 function support hyperdrive to and over 50 individual sound effects available in many great board formats it is the perfect solution for any scale from n scale to g scale one of the many great features and sounds found in tsunami 2 and one of the most fun and prototypically correct is our new soundtracks dynamic digital exhaust now in the diesel locomotive taking into account all of the factors of the locomotive you will be able to listen as the prime mover increases the rpm schedule and even the decibel level when the engine needs it the feature accounts for all variables a locomotive will encounter including grade acceleration deceleration and tonnage no longer simply increasing rpms by speed step settings or manually notching the rpms this decoder mimics everything that is really happening and it does so with significant increases or decreases in the volume as well notice as the engine begins to move how the engine load increases then backs off as it reaches track speed now listen as the engine digs in on this uphill grade and as a locomotive comes up the hill and onto level track you can hear it throttle down automatically as the load is decreased on the locomotive next notice as the locomotive and train comes off of level track into a downhill grade the locomotive throttles back it eases back and it starts to coast down the grade all automatically and as the train is going downhill I'll hit f11 to set up the brakes and you can actually hear the train braking and slowing to a stop tsunami 2 has three forms of actual functioning brakes available with different braking rates in all three variations just like the prototype you have access to the locomotive brake known as the independent brake the train brake known as the automatic brakes and finally when you need more braking effort on your mountain grades you can load up the dynamic brakes on the engine tsunami 2 fun doesn't end in the yard with the addition of firemen ed fuel and servicing functions and the ability to charge your train you can add a new level of automation to your operating experience with so many new features and sounds focused on real rariting fun tsunami 2 truly is a new dimension in digital sound technology from sound tracks