 What are you shooting today, Jeff? Another freight car. It's an Atlas model. It was X-Pen Central, patched for Conrail. A lot of people called them roller jobs because when the Conrail got them, they just rolled out the Penn Central marking zone. Nice. The roof looks nice, too. Thank you. You got a really nice day to shoot today. That's a really nice job, Jeff. Let me interrupt you for a second. How did you achieve that effect on that freight car, the rust and this faded effect? It's all done with pretty much oil paints. The fade was done with white oil paint to fade the original factory color. It's a factory painted Atlas model. And all the rust is done with oil paints, too. Mostly burnt sienna and burnt umber. And using really small brushes. And like most my models, they use a prototype picture for reference. The streaks are amazing. They're straight. You did a great job on that freight car, Jeff. Thank you. Man, thanks for sharing it with us today. For this segment of What's Neat this week, I want to talk to you about spray booths. I built this, my spray booth, in 1990. So it's 24 years old, and let me tell you what, it works. This is a pre-design that I actually thought through. It's all built out of wood. I've got an air supply that comes in down the wall, plugs into my air unit underneath where I've got a dryer that runs up and then I am supplied with an air supply that I've got right here that comes in from the wall, like I said. And then the runs through on copper tubing to three outlets that I've got. So I've got air for three different air brushes. So in case I'm doing two colors at one time and I've got my third air brush full of cleaner, I can easily work with a three-outlet setup. My airbrush is stored really nice in a side storage compartment, and then I've got a switch where I flip the switch and I've got 500 cubic feet of air flow when I need it to suck the paint fumes out of the building safely with no wife coming down and saying you've smelled up the house, honey. So that's really an important thing to cover. I've also put a light bar inside. I'm about to replace this with LEDs but this has been halogens which gave me three good lights to light up the area while I was painting. I've got a filtration system that keeps the fan blades of the blower from clogging up with paint and all you simply do is you pull this filter out from on top and lift it right out and replace it with a new filter. Now another feature I built on this was when the guys saturday evenings we like to look at different models. So I built a table surface here that we could put our models on, have a really nice light that's adjustable, dimmer. So we can look at models plus it's a great surface for working when you're painting your models. You can put your oven tray here so that as you're spraying and painting your models you then put them on your tray and get ready to bake them in the oven at 120 degrees. I also like to use this rotating lazy Suzanne that's got large scale G scale, O scale and HO track on it. And when I'm sitting here spraying I can spin it around I'll have a locomotive on there as you can see in this video clip where I'm painting an Allegheny. But as you can see I can turn the diorama around and actually stand here and paint and have the air sucking out safely no problems. I've got a paint rack on the side of the spray booth. It all balances out because the booth itself is built on a really wide platform so the weight of the paint has never caused anything to be top heavy but yet the whole system completely rolls. You can reposition it to the middle of the room in the event that you're shooting or spraying a very large diorama here where you want good air flow suction coming out. Like I said I've got 500 cubic feet of air flow blowing through duct work of about 6 to 8 inch duct work blowing right out the side of the property so it's a very good way to evacuate the air so that the air that you're breathing while you're working is still clean. This system works this is a great way to design an air spray booth. For this segment of What's Neat this week I'm going to talk to you about the 7 band equalizer that comes in all tsunami soundtracks decoders. Now working with soundtracks over the past year I've learned a few things about decoders that I didn't have a clue about. As far as I'm concerned you can take a fish hook put it through them, throw them in the water and with all those colorful wires you might catch yourself a great catfish in one of these Missouri rivers. But the deeper I got into it and understanding the tech manuals and understanding exactly what these decoders will do I've come to the realization that it's worth sharing with you on this What's Neat this week segment. And over the time I've discussed the 11 feature in one segment I'm going to discuss dynamic digital exhaust in another segment but for this segment I want to talk about the 7 band equalizer. Just like the equalizer on your car stereo you can adjust the timber and the base of the locomotives and the steam locomotives so that you can have more highs or more base adjusting the sounds. You do this by adjusting CVs 153 through CV 60 the long way or as I've got it set up here I'm using decoder pro right now where I can actually look at slides as if it was an equalizer and adjust those so that I get out, I get rid of the mid range I induce a little more highs and a little more base which really brings out the aesthetics of the sound especially when you're in a locomotive and the sound speakers are in a boxed enclosure. This is really an effective way. So watch this next segment as I describe to you and show to you the 7 band equalizer and how it works. Now for this demonstration I've taken two identical inter-mountain locomotives and two identical Blackstone steam locomotives all have the tsunami digital sound decoders in them and I've programmed the ones on the rear track to have a little bit more base a little bit more oomph using the 7 band equalizer the locomotives on the foreground track are still set to factory default settings so you'll hear the difference in this next upcoming clip that shows side by side the two locomotives and how they sound. Using decoder pro on my laptop I was able to program the locomotives in this case this locomotive to have a lot of base and then the other locomotive on the foreground track to have a lot less base that locomotive had a lot more highs. Ok for this demonstration the locomotive on the rear track has been programmed with a lot of base the locomotive in the foreground track has been programmed so that it's got a lot of highs and I've completely eliminated the base so that you can hear the difference that the 7 band equalizer allows starting with the rear engine and then the rear engine with more base the difference is very apparent on these two Blackstone steam locomotives the locomotive on the rear track has had its decoder programmed so that it's got a lower chuck a lot more oomph the locomotive on the foreground track has had its decoder programmed so it's got a lot more highs and I took out most of the base just to illustrate the difference between the two locomotives and the 7 band equalizer's capabilities you don't have to be an audio whiz to program and optimize a 7 band equalizer mess around with it a little bit see what sounds good to you and for further tips and ideas on how to use this check the soundtracks website at www.soundtracks.com for this segment of what's neat this week I want to talk about something track a lot of folks refer to microengineering track which I think is probably the most beautiful track on the market as being too stiff and difficult to work with and I'll tell you there's an easy way around that I got a couple pieces of scrap wood here and I've got a big lighter to illustrate this and I'll start with the lighter all you need is something with a round edge whether it's a piece of wood smooth over even an angle like this will work but what you do is you take you take your lighter for example and you run it along the ties now mind you this is microengineering track it's pretty stiff but you can bend just about any radius you want and if you want to take it back out you just flip it over and do it the opposite way you don't break your ties and you can bend this into a 15 inch radius if you wanted to very quite simply by using a lighter piece of wood here I'll straighten out the piece of track again just using a piece of wood two by four look at that this works so anybody that tells you microengineering is stiff if you approach it this way using just a couple pieces of scrap wood or a lighter you can bend microengineering track any way that you want so that's just something I thought it would be fun to talk about