 I'm Michelle. And I'm Daniel Coombs. And January What's Neat starts right now. The What's Neat show is sponsored by Lombard Hobbies. Your value hobby shop for over 40 years of modelers helping modelers. Big inventory, value pricing, fast shipping and great service. This is What's Neat in Moderality for January 2021. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we do have a good show in that I share with you four different ways to model ponderosa pine trees for your model railroad layout. Also this month we've got a great interview with Dennis Krausman and he shares his beautiful Santa Fe layout and HO scale. I would like to thank Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois for helping support the What's Neat show and helping us to promote the best hobby in the world. And I would like to remind you to please watch the What's Neat this week video podcast on YouTube. That's a show where we keep you updated every single week on what's new in the hobby with special guests, new products and the latest news on everything that's going on again in the best hobby in the world, the hobby of model reordering. And with that, let's continue on with the rest of this January 2021 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, we're going to discuss building beautiful ponderosa pine trees and using them as scenery on your layout in HO scale and scale O scale or large scale. These trees work great in the real world in the prototype. These trees are absolutely beautiful. They grow to be very tall and as the trains run through the scenes, the trees working their way all around as beautiful vegetation simply compliments the overall prototype scene. As you can see in this video footage right here. Now first of all, I'm going to talk about these trees that you see here. These are from Grand Central Gems. They come in a package like this and in this case I've got the medium trees, which are about three or four inches tall. These trees come from about one to two inches all the way up to I've seen them about eight inches or nine inches tall, ready to go already pre-made and they're not very expensive. I ordered these by going through my Walthers catalog to find out what sizes were available before I went to my favorite hobby shop and purchased them. They also come ready to go with snow on them. They make for wonderful winter scenes. I've used them in various scenes and they do look great in outdoor sunlight on mountain snowy type scenes as you build for your layout. One other thing that I like to do and that's going to be the purpose of this video today is to make the taller ponderosa pines that accent these smaller trees on your layout. These two types of trees work together, make for very effective scenes, whether you're building a mountain or a tunnel or you're simply using the trees and their vertical height to create a seam block on your layout or simply just cover up the whole train as the train runs through the middle of a pine forest. It's a very effective, neat way to model a railroad, whereas you don't even have to build a mountain, you can just depend on trees to create your view block and your scenery vertical. Now what we're going to do and the way we start out making pine trees like this is we generally start out with a dolla rod. It's the dolla rod that is the main trunk of these tall trees. Now in HO scale I like to use quarter inch dolla rod to make trees that are as tall as 60 feet in HO scale height. I like to go with 3 eighth inch dolla rod to make trees that are more close to this 85 footer that you see right here. Now I've seen people model these in G scale and O scale and in G scale they get pretty big around the base, maybe almost an inch in diameter and then you then work up the tree as you taper it and that's the first step in the process is you need to take the dolla rods that you purchase after you have them cut to the right length that you want, we need to taper them from what they originally start out with and then work them up to the top of the tree where the dolla rod gets much more thin. Now there's various ways to taper dolla rods and I'm going to show you a few ways to do that and in fact if you look at these skewers that you use for making shiskabobs these are already just about the right length for a small tree if you cut them right about here and these are very small about an eighth of an inch in diameter so they make for great 30 or 40 foot tall pine trees and they look just fantastic and if you think about it it's also just about the size of an HO scale telephone pole anyway which is where our telephone poles generally come from are trees just like these. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you the various ways to start tapering the dolla rods I will share with you three ways that I have found to taper dolla rods for making our tree trunks in this first example I have a drill running at 1000 rpm it is clamped into a metal vise the dolla rod is set in the one half inch chuck of the drill I use a horse rasp to carve and taper the three eighths inch dolla rod as I move the drill back and forth the dolla rod rests on a two by four giving support as I let the rasp cut into the wood after about five to seven minutes the dolla rod is tapered into what will become our tree trunk another way to taper a dolla rod is by using a Stanley shore form planer to cut and carve the tree trunk down to size this method takes about 20 minutes to complete I find it is best to wear a glove to prevent from getting blisters on your skin while it is more arm work to do it this way the end result comes out pretty good the fastest and most easy way to taper our dolla rods is to chuck them into a drill press you'll want to set your drill press speed to its highest setting and in this case I've set it to 3000 rpm I also wear gloves and I use two horse rasps at the same time to cut the dolla rod on either side at the same time down to a taper using the drill press like a lay saves a lot of time in the event that you are making a lot of trees be sure to wear gloves to protect your hands from the sharp rasps edges total carving time using this method is about two minutes I also follow up this process using 60 grit sandpaper to smooth out the grooves that the rasps tend to make in the wood to create the carve tree bark effect in our taper doll rods I find its best and most simple way to do it is to run the rasp up and down the dial parallel cutting grooves into the tree making for a trunk like effect that looks relatively good when it's finished to color our tree trunks I like to use minwax dark walnut stain this gives a rich dark color to our trees that looks realistic in outdoor sunlight another way to color our tree trunks is to color them with rustoleum stone texture spray paint this sprays on with a multicolor texture type finish that makes great looking tree bark for our taper doll rods I also like to use this paint when I'm making wire armature trees deciduous type trees to create a base for our trees I cut the head off of a six penny finishing nail I then drill a hole into the bottom of our tapered tree trunk using the drill press then I super glue the nail into this hole this makes it easy to stick the finished trees into our foam scenery when they're finished so here you see the different types of tree trunks that we've created out of our doll rods by simply shaving them down into the right shape now the these three on this side were again painted with the stone this rustoleum American accent stone color which gives a really nice bark effect the ones on this side I then stained with of course this beautiful dark walnut stain and then I sprayed a little bit of camouflage brown over that just to give it a little bit of different shade of brown in addition to the stain so these two are stained and painted and these are then painted with simply the stone texture type paint which gives a nice bark effect so now at this point the next step I want to show you the various ways to add greenery branches and turn these beautiful sticks and the gorgeous ponderosa pine trees so now we want to finish our ponderosa pines now that we've got our bark trunk structures completely built by coating them with the foliage the different types of branch structures that we're going to make to put around our tree trunks there's multiple ways to do it and I'm going to show you four different ways that I know about to do this the first and easiest way to do it is using a furnace filter material that's generally called hogs hair and what this is this is not fiberglass this material you can get at true value or any of your hardware stores it generally comes in a package just like this and what it is it's a fibery natural material it makes great branch structures for our trees when we break this down into small pieces and I'm going to show you how to do that the next type of material that we're going to use I found this farmy looking artificial plastic material at Hobby Lobby and I've never tried this before but just the design by structure it looks like it would make beautiful branch structures for making pine trees another material that's tried and true it's been used for years in our hobby to make pine trees is this caspia this is a natural product you can generally find it at a hobby shop where it's dry I actually purchased this material today fresh and have been drying it for almost eight hours and it also makes great looking branch structure for making pine trees the last material that we're going to try I've never actually tried before but I know it will work is we're going to use these Bachman wire foliage branches we're going to strip all the material off the branches and simply use the wire armatures as the branch structures for our pine trees so we're going to start with the hogs hair and I'm going to briefly describe to you and show you the process that is used to make pine trees out of hogs hair you start by taking this material and stripping it off of the screen material that it comes on and you want to break it up into small sections about like this and then you want to start spreading it apart it's kind of thick and it's in layers as you pull it apart you'll end up with smaller pieces of what I will call branch structure and this material is then slid down onto the slid down onto the um doll rods that we have made and here on this tree you can see where I've placed a lot of the material on all of these the same fashion it's been placed over and around the doll rod what I do is after I put it onto the doll rod these small sections and I'll pull one off so you can see how big it is it's not very big at all I then super glue these onto the doll rod tree structure spacing them about a half of an inch apart and what you end up with is a tree structure that looks kind of similar to this after it's been super glued in a place I then take a pair of scissors and I trim it so that it's got a structure that looks more like a pine tree symmetry is what I'm trying to say so it's wider at the bottom and it gets smaller as you go all the way to the top after it's trimmed I then take rustoleum camouflage brown spray paint and I like to spray the structure the little branches just to tone them down because sometimes this material comes in bright green and the colors that I've got here are actually dark blue so I spray it with paint just to make it look a little bit more realistic after it's sprayed with paint then we're going to come across and we're going to flock it spray it with hairspray and then cover it with fine ground foam I like to use woodland scenics medium mixed green fine ground foam when I cover these up then to further enhance this tree structure you can come along with a static grass gun and use some green static grass to create the effect of pine needles over all of the foliage and what you end up with as I will show you in these photographs is a very beautiful looking pine tree that's very quick very easy to make you can make a lot of them very quickly and as you can see from these that are are not finished yet the structure is very easy to obtain once it's slid over your dowel rods the next tree that we're going to make we're going to start working with the caspia now we'll show you how to do that next so now I'm going to show you how to make pine trees using this caspia I picked these up at a florist and spent all day yesterday drying them the ones that I've gotten in the past and the first time I've ever made trees using this method was about 1985 when in fact I made some beautiful trees I'll show you a picture of them right now and they came out really great so the process for doing this is I've got my dremel and you can use a drill press or you can use a pin vice if you want to drill the holes into our tree trunk the dremel is much quicker than using a pin vice and all I'm simply doing is I'm drilling the holes into the piece of wood all the way around the piece of wood similar to that of the way they used to do artificial Christmas trees a long time ago I'm drilling the holes with a number a drill bit that measures about 45 thousandths of an inch in diameter so it's just a little bit smaller than a 16th of an inch drill bit and I'm drilling the holes all the way around the tree trunk working my way up I'm drilling them relatively straight into the tree trunk and the reason for that is as we put the caspia in it's going to kind of droop down and I'm going to use white glue and I'm going to stick these caspia branches into my holes I'm going to work my way all the way up the tree and all the way around the tree as I continue to add more and more of these branches as I go along using the dremel motor tool I took my time and drilled a lot of random holes working my way up the tree trunk these holes are where the caspia branches will be glued into place with white glue the dremel worked really well for this as I went along slowly on the next tree that I do I've decided I am going to use the drill press because the process will be much faster but so far so good once I had all the holes drilled I started working my way up the tree I trimmed the caspia pieces off of the branch structure and laid them out on the table measuring the larger ones for the bottom of the tree and then as I worked up the branches would get smaller and smaller as I dipped them in the white glue I made sure that the branches drooped down in a prototypical looking fashion similar to that of what you see on a lot of pine trees as you see as I work my way towards the top the tree is starting to look finished now granted it's purple so we're going to paint it and flock it with coloring and it'll dramatically change the appearance of this tree when it's completed so after spraying the tree with brown I've used that rustoleum camouflage earth brown paint to paint all of the wonderful caspia branches a dark color I then took some camouflage green paint and I sprayed the tops of the tree with a little bit of green now what I'm going to do is hit the whole tree with some wonderful aquanet hairspray and flock the entire top of the tree with woodland scenics mixture here of blended turf I'm going to get the bottom as well I want to make sure that the trunk of the tree doesn't have any green on it which I'll go through and clean that off and what we end up with is a caspia beautiful ponderosa pine just like that after I put the green ground foam onto the caspia tree I took a paintbrush and I removed the ground foam that was stuck to the trunk of the tree as I worked my way up this brush was stiff and it easily removed all of the green from the trunk so next comes the wire foliage branches from bottom these are already pre-flocked with greenery and they're simply wire armatures that have already got the foliage on them so this would make for great wire branches starting with the longer ones at the bottom and the shorter ones at the top we're going to cover the next dowel rod with these and the principles can be exactly the same we're going to use a drill bit drill holes into this and then stick all of these branches into the dowel rod as I work my way up the tree I'm pulling the flocking off of the wire armatures on this and I've started again with the longer ones the bottom the medium length ones in the middle and eventually I'll get the smaller ones onto the top I'm simply dipping them in glue pressing them into place and kind of bending the wire armatures at a downward angle it's not a fast process but I think this tree might come out pretty beautiful when it's finished and just like that this tree is completely wired up with branch structures and on the very top I drill the hole straight down and I'm putting in a branch right on the very top sticking straight up just like that and so that's the Bachman wire brush not brush but the wire armatures on a dowel rod it makes for a beautiful looking armature so far so I'm going to flock this with woodland scenics um flocking and then I'm going to go ahead and use static grass on this tree I think that'll look absolutely fantastic so now I'm going to put woodland scenics fine ground foam on this wire armature tree and we'll clean the ground foam off of the tree trunk in the event that it sticks to it I'm sure it will put static grass on this and I think that'll make a big difference for creating pine needles on this uh branch structure again I'm going to wet the tree with hairspray and I'm going to wet the trunk this time so I get good electrical contact down to the nail for the static grass applicator I've got short nap grass in this I don't have any long static grass at the moment but I think this will suffice as I turn the gun on you'll see it's attracted to the tree as I start shaping it so amazing how this works look at that the pine needles on it made from the Bachman wire armatures now I've got a stiff paint brush and I'll go through the center trunk and wipe off all the static grass that's sticking to the trunk areas clean that up a little bit so next we're going to try making a tree the fern looking plastic material now for our last pine tree we're going to use this ferny material that I picked up at hobby lobby there's no way to identify this other than a tag on here it's got a simple number on it of 1727 551 it's a product number for those that might want to search this out this is a great looking material that's got really a pine tree effect looking branch structure and what what I've been doing is first of all these have got metal in them metal wire so you cut this with a pair of wire cutters and then you work your way down cutting each size difference of branches and I've been sorting them out on the table and just as we did before we're going to take the larger branches at the bottom of the tree and work our way up to the top of the large pull pines of the trunks as we work along process will be exactly the same whereas I'm going to drill holes into our doll rods and then insert the beautiful branches into the doll rods and then we'll figure out what covering that I do whether I flock them or whether I static grass this plant so let's let's see what happens next for our last final pine tree for this segment of what's neat so I've added 32 branches up to this point and I'm three quarters of the way up the tree it's having great effects right now I'm putting on the medium-sized branches which are about a scale 10 feet in length and I'm working my way up putting each branch into the white glue and then sticking them into the holes that I've drilled into the trunk of the tree after about an hour I put almost 50 different branch structures on this doll rod and this is the plastic fern material from Hobby Lobby now this would look great if we simply just painted it with an airbrush a darker shade and it would look very realistic just the way it comes but I think what I'm going to do is go ahead and put very fine woodland scenic ground foam on this and hairspray and see if we can add a little more texture to this tree so let's go ahead and do that a little bit on the bottom as well just fill it in good I don't see the need to put static grass on this tree it looks dynamite just the way it's coming out and just like that this is our fourth way to make ponderosa type pine trees pretty neat so I brought all of our pine trees out in real sunlight so that we can have a recap and see exactly what we've done now with the four different ways that I've shown you now to make different types of pine trees first of all the hog's hair fur is filtered trees you can see how they look in real sunlight they're very quick and easy to make and I think they're effective also the caspia pine tree again all the detail the beautiful branch structure I think that's also a neat way to make trees and of course the bachmann wire armature tree that we flocked with static grass to represent all the individual pine needles again I think that's a beautiful tree look how great that looks in sunlight and the last tree is using the plastic fern that artificial plant looking material that I picked up again another beautiful way to make pine trees there's a lot of different methods a lot of different ways to do this I've shown you just four in this video and with that let's call this a segment a great segment for what's neat that is this segment for what's neat for this segment of what's neat I'm with Denny Krausman here in Colorado and I've I'm looking at his beautiful Santa Fe layout that he's built lots of aisle space just great looking layout Denny tell us about this layout we're really excited to see it on what's neat okay well what I've tried to do here is recreate the Santa Fe railway and basically the passenger mainline that was went through southeastern Colorado and I picked the time frame of 1948-1949 because I love steam and I wanted to have war bonnet diesels and some early generation diesels so that's why I picked that time frame I'd also had the opportunity to be in the southeast Colorado area once back in the 90s and was able to say this is where I want to create my Santa Fe railway because it had an opportunity for me to add a branch line that came out of holly as well as the passenger mainline that went through that area and of course I don't build mountains so I wanted something that was flat and so that was the perfect area for what I wanted to do in the time frame so then for the next five or six years I spent time down there taking pictures gathering pictures so I could figure out what everything looked like in 1948-49 so I could recreate it and that that's really the layout in a nutshell and I grew up on a farm in central Iowa and our farm was bisected by the Milwaukee mainline that went from Chicago to Omaha so I saw trains running up and down through our farm every day 24-7 and I had several relatives that worked for the railroad too so I kind of had this subliminal subconscious desire for trains and I've always loved things mechanical I mean that growing up on a farm that's how you learn you know mechanics is part of it so that was always there and then in at Christmas of 1974 my wife and I have two daughters and I was putting doll buggies and houses together and I told my wife I need a hobby for me I need my toys so the day after Christmas I went out and bought my first HO train set I had a Lionel growing up and I mean it just blossomed from there I just everything that I wanted to do I wouldn't say that I'm a select craftsman in any way but it was a it was a way for me to build things with my hands and and to do things and my passion has always been since I got into it scratch building I love to scratch build cars buildings everything and I like to recreate the prototype everything I've tried to do here is should be fairly close to prototypical so that's my real passion and of course over the last 40 some years it's it's blossomed into what you see here now this is my third layout one in Sioux City Iowa where I started the next one was in Parker Colorado and this is my third layout here in Lone Tree so this is very nice now you've got minimum radiuses how many feet of track you got here there is in just in the mainline track here exposed there's 150 feet lineal feet doesn't count sightings or anything else but just basically 150 feet are running plus another 75 feet almost 80 feet a branch line so gives everybody plenty of places to run I you know I do like operations obviously as you can see from the car cards and the waybills so and then if you add all the track you can't see like in the helix and everything else if you go down through the helix is through the staging which there's a balloon track you can do that you end up with over 400 feet of running so it gives you at least you can run a train for a few minutes before you have to stop so I like that I appreciate you showing us we can really see your passion for trains Denny thank you but yeah so this is southeast Colorado uh somewhere along the line I had a great great uncle who was a passenger conductor on the Santa Fe railway and I'd seen pictures of him and of course growing up everybody knows what a Lionel Santa Fe war bonnet scheme looks like and so in about oh the late 90s well early 90s I decided what I wanted to do was recreate something in Santa Fe and I happened to be working down in southeast Colorado and saw the Santa Fe didn't see passenger trains by then but uh said this is what I want to do because I could build a branch line I could have flat main lines not a mountain builder so that's how this came about so that took me about I don't know five or six years of thinking planning and growing plans up and then realizing that my wife wanted to move so I had plans got thrown away we bought this house and I redrew the plan so I could put the Santa Fe layout here so it just fits right in this room yeah it it worked well so I was happy with that so and have a decent aisle space not huge but decent aisle space for operating so that's where we got to here and of course I've always had a passion for steam and growing up as a kid you know I saw Milwaukee steam still running in the 50s through our farm so I wanted to create a time frame where I could have steam but I also wanted war bonnet diesels so that's why I ended up with late 48 early 49 so I could have both I see you've done a lot of research and that's awesome tell us about the height of the layout this looks like a perfect height what what is your rail height on this 54 inches that's great and your minimum radius it looks like it's got to be what 48 inches or uh actually minimum radius is 36 inches this is nice and I see car cards all over as we looked up and down the aisle there um you do operation is that right I do operations and of course that was part of designing the layout and was to have it so it could operate so there would be plenty of places to do local switching right as well as create several yards where people could read who like intense switching how many people does it take to operate this loud Denny 12 so you've got 12 guys here and do you pick a night during the month that you do this do you do this regularly I do this regularly and we have been meeting on Friday evenings we're going to switch now to Saturday afternoons that just seems to be a better time uh people get tired on a Friday evening now the scenery is absolutely beautiful your valence lighting looks really neat the way you've encased it into your concoves over the top here this is just a great design well thank you um I actually I had seen several layouts in Kansas City that had something similar and I said I like that because I've been on several layouts where had valence and lighting like that which would look up and you can see all the wires and the lights and I didn't want that I I kind of wanted that hit um someone told me once that you should design your layout so that the focal point is the layout it's not your valence it's not your lighting it's you know the highlight so I tried to keep everything and kind of an off-white uh hide the lights make them effective so they light up and you see the layout that's what it was all about I am so impressed with this it is beautiful thank you Denny for sharing this with us on what's neat thank you all of the products seen on this episode of what's neat are available from Lombard hobbies in Lombard Illinois or order online at Lombard hobby.com