 Hi, I'm Ed Dressel. The November What's Neat starts right now. This is What's Neat for November 2016. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month Hollywood actor Michael Gross stops by the studio and gives us a really short interview about his modeling experiences. He ran a few trains and felt right at home as he watched What's Neat this week pretty much every month and he was familiar already with operating my layout. He was so gracious and friendly as everyone took turns getting a selfie photo as you see Jeff Meyer and Michael setting up this shot. We were just having fun with a fellow modeler. For tooltips this month, we show how to use an oscillating sander to easily shake our modeling paint prior to airbrushing. For this month's layout construction segment, we refinish an existing folding trade show layout for Athern and then we deliver it to a trade show. Also this month, Matt Herman from ESU Loak Sound demonstrates, explains and shows how his line of sound decoders can enhance our operating experience. And that's the lineup for this November 2016 What's Neat. These bottles came for about five years, they haven't been shook up. He'll help with that. Boy, it sure would be nice if there was some way to shift. If there was only some kind of machine that someone could invent. He's probably got someone figured out. Stir this here. No, you try that. I'll try this. We'll see. He wants to know everything about it. Alright, we'll just keep shaking. That's it. You stole my idea. You got them bottle shook up yet? I was like, I do. Huh? This isn't in for your job. No, I still got slug. And so just like that, you can shake up a bottle of paint with a simple tool. These little oscillating sanders. I could see at some point making a clamp on, rivet on clamp where you could clamp the bottle of paint into the shaker and actually have a product that's saleable to be flipped onto one of these devices. Is this the one you just did? Yeah. Let's see how good that is. Let me say five years. All of us. So no fuss. No muss. No mess. No work. Just by doing it that way. I gotta tell you what, I think that's another tip on what's neat, huh? This segment of what's neat, I've got Michael Gross in the studio today and I thought we'd just talk about trains and find out why is it that Michael Gross is involved in the hobby. What is it that got you interested in this hobby, Mike? My grandfather worked 56 years for the adjacent speak in Santa Fe. Okay. And he was a switch engine foreman, a hustler, and among other things. And he worked in the shops at Fort Madison, Iowa, shopped in Iowa, which at that point was the division point between the Illinois and Missouri divisions. And then it was finally combined in 1955 into one great division from Chicago to Kansas City. But he was a railroader for 56 years. His father before him worked for the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, the CBNQ, and the Santa Fe Railway. And he was a boiler maker and my understanding was a very, very good boiler maker when he was sober. And so, yeah. And he went back and forth from the Santa Fe to the CBNQ because he kept laying off every time he'd get a paycheck. He'd go on a three-day drunk and he'd come back and they'd fire him, and he kept going back and forth because apparently he was such a good boiler maker, they kept taking him back after he'd dried out a little bit. So I come from a long line of drunks. Well, following the family here, could you be working for the railroad then? Yes, exactly. And she'd be drinking right now, which I'm not. Anyway, I did go to work for the Chicago Northwest Railroad in 1967. I had to get it out of my blood. I was working my way through college and it was a great way to go. A lot of people hiring out as swishmen and breakmen and I kept bugging the chief master mechanic until he gave me a job on a locomotive and so I was one of the last card-carrying members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen before they were observed into the BLE, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. So when did the trains come in? The models hit you? The models really started because I was so close to my grandfather. I mean, I love the guy. I really did. I came to associate what he did with how much I cared for him. And so I was trained crazy from the time I was an infant. There's a story my grandmother tells about how I would play outside their house and knock on the door and knock on the front door and she'd answer and I'd say, the engineer wants a sucker. And so at age four, that was all I wanted to do. And all through the 50s and the 60s when everybody else wanted to be astronauts, no, I still wanted to work for the railroad. And look what happened to me. I wound up doing something completely different. Different. And I've never played a locomotive. Have you played a locomotive? No, no, no. Okay. Should have been on petticoat chunks. Something like that, or that Back to the Future or something like that. Okay. I guess you're here for the prototype modelers meet. How'd you enjoy that show this weekend? I really did. This was my first time to St. Louis Collinsville and I know there are some hardcore people there and I learn something great from them all the time. I myself am probably not, I couldn't call myself a prototype modeler. I take aspects of the prototype. I beg, borrow and steal. I'm an illusionist. It's like what I do for a living, right? Sure. You know, I'm creating the perfect illusion. Every thing does not have to be in place as long as I make people think it's in place. Okay. You know. So you know how it is. On the stage, the other side of the flat is completely blank, you know. You step out of the set and it's all wood and bracing and none of it's real. And so that's how I think of model reverting too. Wow. You know, I mean presenting a perfect illusion. And there's so many modelers out there would like to be in that type of industry because they think that when they're building models all day, well I could build those things. I could do that hollywood work. Well, they're a good number of talented people and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they couldn't. That business is out there. Yeah. And it's a pleasure being here with you. I've seen your show for a long time. I've seen your work online and in print. You know, I appreciate that. Maybe in the future we could get you to do a segment on something one of your special interests that you have in the hobby. But I really appreciate you taking the time for us and being on the show just for a few minutes. Absolute pleasure. It's a pleasure meeting you, Mike. Thanks. Thanks, Ken. Okay. Same here. This segment of What's Neat, you remember this folding trade show display layout that Athern sets up to run trains when they do a trade show. And this layout has come back to my studio recently to just kind of give it a little bit of a makeover. Make sure everything's working good on it. Give it some new power feed wires. And I was also instructed to take the sides of it, this beautiful oak that has been stained with a natural color clear coat and make it black. Give it that old stereo equipment look of the, you know, the 70s where it's just black high gloss and then you can just see the wood green in it. And I think that'll look really nice. I sanded the woodwork of the layout with an electric oscillating sander. Now, this didn't damage any of the scenery and it kept the dust to a minimum. I used Minwax Polyshade stain and polyurethane mixture, classic black high gloss, working my way around the entire layout, careful not to get any of the black on the scenery. I used a 20 inch painter's mask to aid in this process. It took about an hour to color the woodwork. The layout started to take on a very professional and pleasing look. The black sides framing the scenery completely changes the layout's appearance in a good way. I applied the same black finish to the outside woodwork of the folding layout to give it that finished look. Turning my attention to the power feed wiring, I drilled holes into a sheet of brass stock, one in the center to accept a guitar jack, and four holes, one on each corner for mounting screws. I test fit the female two conductor guitar jack into the brass face plate. I then drilled holes into the layout to mount the brass plate and run the wires. I snaked the wires from the corner of the layout to the track. Running the wire under the fake fur was a simple way of accomplishing this task. Using a pencil tip iron, I soldered the wires to the female guitar jack power leads using rosin core solder. I then moved on to solder the other end of the wires to each of the rails on the layout. The wires will be hidden from view with a little fresh ballast. Using a buffing wheel attached to a dremel, I polished the brass face plate to a reflective mirror finish. I attached the face plate to the bottom of the layout with four one quarter inch black screws. The male guitar jack simply fits into the face plate providing the layout with power. Refinishing the scenery involved, repairing a few cracks in the ballast by simply applying new ballast and gluing it into place with a good soaking of Woodland Scenic's Scenic Cementch which should prevent further cracking. I vacuumed the layout, cleaned the track and test ran a locomotive around the entire layout just to make sure everything ran smooth so that when it is set up at its first train show appearance at the 2016 NMRI National, it'll look good. Jeff Otto helped me fold up the layout and then we loaded it into my truck on a nice soft blanket for the road trip. The 250 mile drive from St. Louis to Indianapolis, Indiana was enjoyable and to me it really wasn't long enough because I loved driving my truck and just letting my mind wander into thought. Once at the show, I was escorted into the convention center truck and all. Once parked at the athern booth, the crew were ready to unload the layout onto the trade show floor. Upon setting the layout up in place and opening it up, it looked fresh and new. As I had Chris Palameriz's seal of approval ready to display athern trains to all the wonderful model railroaders attending the NMRA train show and that ends this layout construction segment on What's Neat. I've got Matt Herman from ESU from Look Sound Electronics. Now on the show, we've featured TCS. Is that the name of the company? And then we've featured Soundtracks and Sonami 2 and Sonami 1 decoders and today we're going to talk about the Look Sound decoder. So with the show, we're getting an equal time to understand each system. There's no such thing as one's better than the other. Each system's different in how you use your layout but I've come to discover. So let's get an education and learn all about Look Sound today. Matt, it's all yours, baby. Well, Ken, I wanted to kind of introduce myself to your crowd a little bit. You have some really good viewers and I want to make sure that they know who I am. A little bit about my history and what makes ESU just a little bit different. I tend to, for whatever reason, just luck at the draw, I tend to be at the face behind ESU and sorry for all your viewers, I've got that face for radio. My history is that I've come from Bowser and there are people who know that. I've been the project manager for Bowser for five or six years, executive line projects and all of that was kind of my baby as I got started. Before that, my father was a chief mechanical officer for a railroad in Pennsylvania so I was up running trains before I could drive. I was riding trains and my mother's, I have pictures of myself getting on the CN 6060 in Toronto, Ontario. My life has been about trains. It's not a job to me by any means. This is my lifestyle. I eat, sleep and breathe trains whether my wife likes it or not. How many years have you been in this industry? It's probably going on about 15 now between Bowser and ESU. So you've got a good feel for things. Now this loke sound, this is a whole other sound system, decoder, what is the magic of loke sound? Well, it's a German company. They based themselves out of Ulm, Germany which is south-central Germany and their main focus before sound is actually motor control. Anything having to do with DCC we create. We have our own command stations. We have our own detectors and switch machine decoders and now we're coming out with something called a signal pilot which will have the logic to run all your signaling systems. But one of the differences, the main differences I'd even say between ESU decoders and a lot of the other prominent sound decoders in the market right now is the fact that our decoders are programmable. So you're not stuck with what you bought out of the box. If you don't like it, if there's an update we just released a new feature set called Full Throttle and maybe a future episode. That feature set is available from the decoders that we made in 2009. When you put that in there it's like a brand new decoder. But you didn't have to tear your engine apart. You didn't have to break all your handrails or mar up all your weathering. You simply put it on the programmer and bang, it's done. You've created a platform that's upgradable that's what you're saying. And then it applies to sound. You can change the sound. What do you download this off the internet? We have two different types of decoders. I'm glad you asked that question. We have a 4.0 and we have a select. Now all the decoders that we provide for manufacturers are select decoders. That's right, they're preset. It's a great way to put it. I look at it in terms of one is you're ordering off the value menu and those numbers on that value menu are already made. You get what that number is. The other one's ordering off a smorgasbord. You get to go around, that would be the 4.0. You get to go around and you get to pick and choose. Well, I want this horn and I want that prime mover and I want that air compressor and I want this set of brake squeals and that's what you can do with a 4.0 plus. Let me ask you something. You lost me. I'm in the hobby shop and I want to buy a low sound decoder. So do I just buy a decoder and I take it home and it can be steam or diesel or is it going to come already? Well, see that's a lot of the misconception that's out there. It's another really good point. Well, you're leading this well. I want to know. You can buy every low sound decoder pre-programmed, whether it be a 4.0 or a select. If you go to your dealer and you know what you're going to be putting it into he can provide that already programmed whether he programs it himself or whether he buys it from us programmed. But with the low programmer the device that you load the sounds with onto the decoder that's a get to it's not a got to. You do not have to have a low programmer to use ESU decoders. You get to because you get to put your own sounds on it. That 4.0 you could go out and record your own locomotive and create a sound file and put it on yourself. So if I go to Mark Twain hobby that's the hobby shop we got in Hattie Town. I go to the hobby shop and I say hey guys I want a low sound decoder. I will be able to pick either steam diesel or one that could be anything I want it to be. So if you type lowsound.com L-K-S-O-U-N-D there will be a download section and you just go through that download section and pick whatever prime mover very specific prime movers 567B 16 cylinder or 567BC 16 cylinders but you you type in the engine type that you want. I want an F7A and you type in F7A and it will come up with all the appropriate sound files for that F7A I go to the hobby shop with that number and say this is what I want an 8 pin decoder, a 9 pin decoder a 21 pin decoder whatever your fancy might be for that engine. On what's neat this week it's not about who makes a better product it's not about what's better it's about what's out there educate me equally show me every manufacturer give every manufacturer a fair shake to explain to us what it is understanding and with electronics I'm kind of dumb. If there's a downfall in our industry I think especially when it comes to DCC it's just education education of DCC and how it works and education of the prototype that's kind of the mission that I'm on a little bit right now is to try to educate people on both of those things so you've asked about the back EMF style or automatic notching ours is not using that type of method we did that on purpose because there's a lot of people out there that want to have the control of what notch to be in they've been around railroads their entire life they're hardcore operators and they really want it to sound a certain way at a certain time and they want to be able to choose that and back EMF doesn't really allow for that it's got its own brain and it's kind of deciding based on the weight of that train that physical train then this is what it's going to do we call it full throttle and we have a feature called drive hold it's a single button that we turn on and off and I can demonstrate that at some point here today but that button locks the motor speed so when that speed is locked the throttle itself becomes the instrument and I can play that instrument at any note that I want to whether it be in coast or whether it be in notch 2, notch 3 notch 4 we have different levels of acceleration I can go straight up to 8 with that throttle or I can slowly go up depending on how I move my throttle so if I want a power brake, I can do that if I want a wheel slip, I can do that if I want a coast through a yard give it 2 or 3 notches, come back I can do that but I'm choosing because only I know what's in those closed cars if it's a box car and it's loaded or empty, the only way I know that is what's on my car card the decoder can't know what's in there it's not in there a load for a box car could be 100 tons worth of weight so you start adding that up into a train that's a lot but the decoder only knows the true physical weight of that car, our imaginations are telling us whether or not that's loaded or whether that's empty so the hardcore operators are going to be able to see that and be able to judge and adjust that for themselves not just allow the decoder itself to do it so that's one of the reasons that we did it a little bit this is Missouri man this is a show me state can you show me, can you show us the words are awesome, show me absolutely can let's discuss what full throttle does full throttle gives us the ability to completely separate the sound from the motion and as a prototype modeler that can become really fun because so many of us have gone down and sat trackside and we've watched somebody switch cars they wrap it up and they really get it going hard and then they kick it down to idle and they coast it out and come to a break next to the train and make for a smooth couple we can do that really really well with full throttle so to demonstrate that basically full throttle is F9 by default that can be put anywhere since 2009 we've had very very free and open function mapping every button can do anything any of the other buttons can do even if another button is already pressed we're looking for that there's a lot of that stuff there go to our website look under the full throttle and the function mapping videos that we have there that'll explain that stuff a little more for you we want to watch trains we don't want to hear me talk so basically what I'm going to do is press F9 and F9 will lock the motor at whatever speed that it's going so if I'm sitting still it would be able to ramp up and down just like I were running through the notches I'm sorry in neutral in essence if I get it moving and I lock it it's going to lock at whatever speed I press it at so to demonstrate we've got a Conorill GP38 here it's coupled up to a car we're getting ready to pull the industry so I'm going to without pressing my drive hold or full throttle or F9 I'm just going to slowly increase the throttle release the brakes it's going to start moving give it a little bit of throttle we're going to give it a little goose get it going and then at the speed that I'm comfortable with I'm going to press F9 now it's going to stay at that speed no matter what I do now I'm pulling a little bit of a grade here we've got a load that we've picked up so I'm going to notch it up and you're going to notice as I do the speed doesn't change just remains the same and I can go to whatever notch I feel is appropriate for the load that I'm pulling now if I want to increase my speed I press F9 again and all of a sudden the motor is going to try to catch up to what the sound is doing so my throttle is at 24 out of 128 so if I press F9 the speed is going to try to catch up to 24 out of 128 so I'll release it and you'll notice I'm gradually getting a little faster maybe I've got enough I can just coast through the switch now so I'm going to knock it back to 0 out of 128 my full throttle is still on so I'm just drifting my drive hold is there so I'm just drifting and coasting until I'm through the switch now if I want to slow down I'm at 0 so I press F9 and I just coast it out and by pressing F9 on and off I can now adjust my momentum if I'm pulling a heavy train I can slowly increase my momentum if I'm a light engine or just pulling one car I can pull that off and then go with the actual momentum that's in the decoder so let me throw some switches here so we can get back to our train reverse direction give it a little kick press F9 when I'm at the comfortable speed and coast it out if you've spent much time next to the tracks especially in slow speed moves like this you're often times in coast or in idle more than you're actually in one of the notches I have the ability to do that a little bit more so I'm at pretty flat track now so I'm going to cheat here a little bit even though we're not stopping I'm going to jump off and throw that switch so we can pull that later ring my bell because we're going through an unprotected crossing there's a flagman there he's just really little, you can't see him on camera maybe I need a little more to get all the way back to my train I can bump it up just throttle notch my cars are getting close here I'm going to start slowing down by just, I'm at zero on the throttle and I just feather that drive hold on and off so that I can come in to a nice smooth stop maybe not real smooth but we didn't flatten too many wheels with that little move so now I'm up against my train I've got about, I don't know, eight or nine cars here we want to make sure that the air is okay the air is bled off we want to pump up the air, do a little bit of a brake check and then we can take off so with my drive hold button on now I'm locked at zero I'm locked at stop so I can run the prime mover up to roughly notch three and in most DMDs notch three is about the optimum notch that we want to be in to do an air test because it's a shaft driven air compressor and if it's if the prime mover is going a little faster the compressor is going faster it's pumping up the air a little faster now after notch three you're really not getting any more air out of it there's only so much volume in the line so notch three is typically where you do a brake test so here it's pumped up so everything's good in the back so they tell me on my right so now I can just knock that back down to zero on the throttle it brings it down to idle again my conductor gets back up here so we can get going with the drive hold and now I've got a heavy train so there's a couple ways we can do this I can press F9 and we can ramp it way up so then we can get going hard and pull on a heavy train we can apply the brakes which is now F10 by default and then release the brakes once we get enough build up of the prime mover or I can goose the throttle and if I do it quickly it's called drive hold or start delay I'm sorry and build right into the prime mover sounds so the engine won't actually move if that's turned on until a period of time is expired meaning that I can build up the prime mover a little bit or I can build it up a lot based on how quickly I move my throttle so this case we've got a heavy train I want to build it up a lot so I'm just going to goose the throttle hard and I can go all the way to 99 get it going and now I'm locked at that speed even though the prime mover is really working hard now pulling that hard I might have broken a knuckle or something so we may not want to go all the way to 8 but now I'm at 28 speed steps out of 128 can really work hard like it's really fighting that heavy train slowly release my drive hold gain a little bit of speed a little momentum maybe I need a little more if I throttle that back and forth I can get a little wheel slip out of it once I get the momentum that I want get the speed that I want I can cut that back to where I would like it to go because I know if all of those cars are loaded or empty the decoder can't know that it's a closed car it can only know what the weight of the car is I've got the car cards I know that those are all loads so I can make that work harder and that's the great advantage of full throttle Matt I'm probably going to have to watch this whole segment over again to absorb the locomotive types and exactly what I'm looking at to get my head around this but what I'm seeing is overwhelmingly cool I like it my main mission is education and thank you for giving me the opportunity to share that information with your viewers if they'd like to go to our website then go to www.loksound.com L-O-K-S-O-U-N-D and they can listen to sound samples of all of the stuff that we've talked about here L-O-K-S-O-U-N-D L-O-K-S-O-U-N-D and is that also the same website where you can upload and get the sound samples? that's where you get the downloads and there's a lot of other information all of our manuals are there all of the information about our other products are there as well thank you for coming by have a great day