 Hi, I'm Dino Coombs and in November What's Neat is going to start right now. The What's Neat show is sponsored by Caboose, sharing our passion for trains since 1938. This is What's Neat for November 2019. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we've got a really good show. First of all, Pete Wallinger stops by and he shares with us how to do graffiti on a freight car only using stencils, stencil art, which makes it very easy and quick to do very exact work. He cuts this out with razor blades, which is kind of interesting. Also, James Regear stops by and shares with us how he put LED lights into this Athern F-45 freight locomotive. I think he put about 21 LEDs into it and it's absolutely amazing to watch him walk us through that process. Also, Radisson McGuire stops by and he shares with us his beautiful military train that he modeled, great loads on the flat cars and he also shows that there's a difference between military equipment that's being shipped and military equipment that's out in the field. Speaking of cutting stencils, I've got this Wonder Cutter, a tool from Micromark. This is a very interesting cutting device that uses a razor blade or a razor knife that vibrates at about 41,000 times per second to cut your material. So it just eases right through styrene like butter. It's an absolutely amazing tool and worth checking out. I'd like to say thank you very much to our sponsor, Caboose, out in Lakewood, Colorado. The place to stop for your Christmas gifts this year for your family and friends. I know I'm talking about that now, but it's getting close. So check it out. They've got a ton of experience, very qualified staff, and it's the to-go place for all of your model railroad supplies. And so let's continue on with the rest of November 2019 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm with Rad McGuire out here on the bluff and he's brought some beautiful military models like I've never seen before. I mean, we shot your stuff inside. We're going to show footage of all of this stuff. Tell me about your passion for modeling the military. Well, I've got a lot of friends that served in the Marines, the Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, and, you know, 26 years of listening to all their stories. I figured, well, I might as well start building something. And a couple of years ago, I built a U.S. Army train. And it was it was kind of like what you see here, but it was a lot of just random equipment didn't make any rhyme or reason, sold it for something bigger and better. And I said, well, what's something no one has done before? Well, no one's really attempted to model the the Marine Corps. So after doing some extensive research, I found some companies assault some Marine Corps models at some good prices. And I just started building and buying all that I could get my hands on. Wow. And this is amazing. Now, when you see Marine Corps, these are the ones that are like painted the green and two toned browns. Is that right? The camouflage? Yeah, most of the Marine Corps vehicles that that you see that are they're in the NATO woodland pattern, which is NATO green, NATO brown, NATO black. And then, of course, they're also painting some of their vehicles, tan that are coming back from from overseas in operation, enduring freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan and things like that. And it kind of all depends on there. There's really no reason to what vehicles are painted what per company from what I've realized that you can have a tan tank thrown in with nothing. But all green tanks are all woodland tanks. You've got some that have mixed matched doors and mixed matched wheel sets and things like that. And that's how they really are, because if something breaks, they have to make do with what they've got. And if all you have is a tan vocation, a tan turret on a green truck, then you're throwing that tan turret on the green truck. Right. You don't have to worry about the paint because it's all going to get used for the same thing in the end. And that's pretty much what's been going on here. One of the biggest challenges I realized was the Humvees. No one makes armored Humvees. So I had to turn to Shapeways for the conversion kits and on the road coach chassis. And even with the the cargo trucks themselves, that they're all coming from overseas Germany from a company called Arsenal M. So I'll order probably five or six at a time and then I'll have to wait a month. So it's plain waiting game. The 3D stuff you've had printed that you've showed me is fantastic. But one other thing you pointed out to me that I know since, you know, I kind of toyed around with the military train, too. Right. After seeing that footage from Stephen N. Comroy that we ran last year on the show. And you saw my train in their pales in comparison to your finished product because mine's literally out of the box. But you showed something very important. That is there's a differentiation between military trains you model as loads and military equipment that's ready for the field. Yeah, the the railhead ready models or railhead loads are going to be very minimal, no guns, no packs. At most being loose, you might see the spare wheel sets on the tanks on the trucks and tanks. You might see something called an IFF plate, which is an angled brown plate. And it's essentially from what I understand, it's an infrared plate that distinguishes that your friendly don't shoot at me. Right. Sometimes they leave the turret, the turret armament on. It all depends on who's loading them and what they feel like doing, because they're supposed to take them off. But that doesn't always happen. They're technically supposed to take the doors off, but most military trains that we see on the rails, they don't. And some are even swung wide open, unfortunately. So a lot of it's at your discretion in what you're seeing, but you will never see active guns like 50 cal, the two, four, nine, 16, you'll never see any of that inside these vehicles. Right. They're all inside containers or convex boxes on intermodal cars or even on the backs of some of these trucks. Wow, this is amazing. I can't wait to see this stuff. You're going to set up with the prototype modelers, meet I understand in St. Louis and show off this stuff. You should do some work for the model press. You should write about this. It's great work. Eventually I want to get the train a little bit more completed. I've still got vehicles that I need to get tied down and a couple more loads I want to complete before I go riding for anyone at the moment. Before you leave, I want to ask about your tie down. You told me your tie down chains and things you're made out of that they're brass by a company called Alcum scale models. It's run by a gentleman named Bernard Kimsky. He does a lot of publishing for M.R. Mag and nice. And he actually also produced the red forty one hundred series flat car that we see with the single tank load. That's new, isn't it? It's been out for a couple of years, but he's about to do a new run. So I've actually got a couple of those on order at the moment. So I'm looking forward to getting those kits in and they're all brass, which is he's kind of revolutionized the brass kit market. You don't need to solder them. You just kind of bend them and super glue them in place. OK. And that's that's pretty cool, actually. So he's kind of revolutionized. You don't have to solve the stuff anymore, only if you want to. But the forty one hundred series, sixty eight foot flats, you can only put one in one Abram on on that flat car just because of the it's got hundred ton trucks. Unlike the the green forty forty series that has the Buckeye trucks that can haul to and that's, you know, I'm still learning as I go along with some of the stuff. I mean, I just found a prototype picture of an Abrams tank on an eighty nine foot flat car on a mixed freight. OK. And I was always told, no, you can't do that. So it seems the rules are always changing with the way they look at this equipment. Man, your work is absolutely fantastic. I got to thank you for bringing it over here and showing it to us on what's neat. It's awesome. And that's this segment of what's neat. James Regere and for this segment of what's neat, we're going to upgrade this stock after locomotive with a new sound decoder, LED lighting and prototypical lighting to boot. We're going to upgrade it today to TCS. Well, which offers more lighting functions and better slow speed control. So let's get started. The first step is to unbox the locomotive. Of course, I'm feeling a little bit like James right at this point. Once the locomotive is out of the box, we need to carefully remove the handrails and anything else that might be damaged in the upgrade process. But the process would be the same if you're doing a hood unit that you'd want to remove the handrails before taking the unit apart because you're going to be laying it on the desk. And these are and the handrails are often your thinnest, most vulnerable pieces. I find it helps if you have a box, sometimes from price or or characters that you could use. Just take just pick up your pieces that you're taking off your locomotive, put them in there for safekeeping. Next, let's go ahead and get a Phillips screwdriver. And we're going to remove the fuel tank, remove the screws from the couplers and slide the couplers out. And then you'll find two more screws one under each truck on opposite sides of the locomotive. And with that, you're ready to remove the shell. Use a screwdriver to remove the original wire clips from the original board. And then you can remove the wires and then you're ready to unclip the board from the motor. Here's your old tsunami. Then in the shell, remove all of the lights for replacement with LED. So now that we've gotten the headlights removed, we're going to work on the number boards. Using a small precision screwdriver or an exacto knife blade, gently pry the number boards off of the locomotive and set them aside for later use. Cut out the number boards by tracing your exacto knife along their outlines and scoring until it breaks through. Now, for the classification lights, use a number 56 drill bit to drill through. I find it helpful if you use a number 76 drill bit to serve as a guide hole before proceeding with a larger bit. Counter-sink from the inside of the cab with a one-sixteenth inch drill bit. As always, be careful when counter-sinking not to go all the way through. You'll also want drill holes for your courtesy lights on your locomotive. Take a number 80 bit and drill holes on either end of the courtesy light slots on the front of your locomotive. Then slip your number four exacto blade in between your drill points. Now, you'll want to work from the inside out so that you don't accidentally cut the middle section of the nose. Counter-sink from inside the locomotive with a 3-32 inch bit to accommodate an 0603 LED. As always, with counter-sinking, do a couple turns at a time. Make sure you do not go all the way through the shell. Clean up your slots with your number four exacto blade. At this stage, we want to create pockets for our number boards so that we can fit in our LEDs behind our number board lenses that we just removed from the locomotive but still avoid having light leading into the cap. To do this, simply take some styrene, cut a rectangle slightly larger than your number board opening and glue it onto the back using Model Master Cement or Plastruct. The next stage of the process is to blacken the inside of your number boards or your headlights or any area in the shell where you'll have LEDs. You'll want to paint it black, preferably glossy or semi-glossy to help avoid any kind of light lead where you don't want light to come through your shell. Once the paint is dry, apply chrome paint with a Molotov chrome pen. This will create a nice reflective surface to intensify light where you want it and further prevent it where you don't. With that, the shell is prepared for installing LEDs. But before we get to that step, let's first of all talk about some of the materials involved in this installation. Loove the locomotive mechanic will help provide scale for the components we're talking about. I use three sizes of LEDs and a typical upgrade. A Wade 05 LEDs are the largest. They're slightly larger than what will fit into a 1-16-inch shrink tube without stretching it, which is good because the shrink tubing will get a strong grip when you shrink it down again. 0603s are medium size. I like using a pair of them behind each number board for backlighting. I find that 1 0603 can do an adequate job of lighting both courtesy lights on either the front or rear of the F45. Finally, we have our 0402 LEDs. 0402s are small enough to fit into the palm of loose hand and they seem to be approaching the size of actual scale light bulbs. I use 0402s for any surface mounts on the locomotive, including step lights and ground lights. They also fit handily into the globe of an HO scale beacon, providing a very realistic effect. I find it helpful to lay out my surface mount LEDs onto the back of a piece of tape sorted by size and lined up according to polarity. Surface mount LEDs will have their polarities marked on their backs with an arrow or T pointing from positive to negative. 0402s are no exception, though they are much smaller. 36 AWG magnet wire comes in several colors. Magnet wire is isolated with a thin layer of enamel. Wires this thin cannot be readily stripped, but you can burn the insulation off with your solder iron. I like to use blue for the LED anodes or function common with red or green on the cathodes to delineate various lighting functions. Wasting your magnet wires together will help preserve your LED joints from the pressures of accidentally pulling them apart. Silicone conformal coating or paint from MG chemicals can re-insulate the magnet wire and protect against arcing, while also serving as adhesive to conform the magnet wire to the sides of the shell and out of harm's way. Micro crystal clear from Microscale is my adhesive of choice for LEDs and lighting tubes. It cleans up easily and dries clear, leaving an optical finish. I also use it to make lenses for any classification lights. 116th inch acrylic rods from Plastruct make excellent lenses for headlights. SIP pins are very useful for creating plug-in disconnects. I like having my trucks and locomotive shell fully detachable from the chassis without having to worry about desoldering or cutting any wires for access. I replace the original athern beacon light with a beacon from Details West. I patch the hole from the athern beacon with a circle of styrene that I cut using a leather punch. With a good snug fit and a little blue paint, the entire thing disappeared. I use a similar technique to create a solid bottom for the Details West beacon. I place the base on the roof, drill the number 80 hole through it, and then strung wires through and installed on the locomotive. I put 20603 LEDs behind each number board. I simply lay them out on the tape that desired spacing from each other and then solder them together as a pair. Grill one number 80 hole into each of your number board pockets. Trim your LED wires into the number 80 holes and then secure your LEDs into place within your number boards with micro crystal clear. Go ahead and create the lenses for your classification lights using micro crystal clear at this time. The original number boards from your locomotive are actually clear styrene, although athern has painted them black rendering them opaque. Soak the number boards in 91% aloe soapropal alcohol and clean using a toothpick. Use Google to find your locomotive on the internet and then use a computer graphics program to recreate the number boards with correct font and format. Print them out on tracing paper. Use micro crystal clear to glue your number board blanks onto your printout. When dry, carefully cut your number boards out and apply to your locomotive using micro crystal clear. Once the micro crystal clear on your classification light lenses has set, go ahead and take some 0402 LEDs, one for each classification light and push them into the hole, abutting them into the lens, then cover with micro crystal clear and allow them to dry. At this point, we have three separate lighting functions wired into the locomotive. We have our number boards, we have our beacon, and we have our classification lights. The blue, green, and red colors will help you sort out the wires, but you may want to test them using a power source not exceeding two volts. For paired functions such as your number boards or your classification lights, go ahead and twist the like colored wires together and solder them. Once all the blue wires are soldered together, I like to add a 1K ohm resistor to the function common of each lighting function. Solder the resistor on using a helping hand tweezers and cover with shrink tubing and then proceed to shrink the tubing down. Of course, be extremely careful when operating a soldering iron around your plastic locomotive shell. Use silicone paint to isolate your solder joints. Once it's gelled a little bit on those joints, then you can use more silicone paint to sort of plaster those wires to the roof of your locomotive. I find that the more immobilized the wires are, the less likely failures are later on. Use a screwdriver or other flat metal object to help you smooth the wires to the ceiling. Avoid the temptation to use your fingers because the wires will find them much more attractive than the plastic of your locomotive. Once micro crystal clear and silicone paint has dried, go ahead and paint the rear of your classification lights with black to avoid light bleed through to the cab. You can obscure the rest of the wires from view by using blue paint. After minimal dry time, you should be able to replace the cab of your locomotive and fasten the screws. And then it's time to move on to the headlights and courtesy lights. To make the lens, I take acrylic rod from Plastruct one sixteenth inch and I cut it a manageable length off with a wire cutter. And then I put it into the chuck of a drill. I use the drill as a lathe to create a convex lens on the end of the rod. Starting with the taper file, I work through increasingly fine bits of sandpaper until I'm at a thousand grit for a nice optical finish. I like to use as little light tubing as possible to minimize light loss. I simply make a cut at the desired length and sand it smooth at 90 degrees and finish off with a thousand grit sandpaper for that optical finish. Use your acrylic rods to test the headlight holes in your locomotive. Then go ahead and install your headlight lenses about an eighth to a quarter inch of the headlight lens that should protrude into the shell of your locomotive. To prepare your 0802 LEDs for installation as your headlights, take some one sixteenth inch shrink tubing, stretch it with a pair of pliers to fit over the LEDs. Trink fit it to the end of a one sixteenth inch acrylic rod and then strip from the end of the rod. Be sure to apply force to the shrink tubing, not to the wires. Once you have two of these set up like this, then wire them into parallel with the resistor on the function common. Fit them to your headlight lenses and secure in place with micro crystal clear. Repeat these steps on the rear of the locomotive. Once your headlights are in place, then you can begin putting in your step lights and courtesy lights. This is one of the more tedious processes and you'll have to spend a lot of time waiting for glue and silicone paint to dry. So first let's take 0603 LEDs and put one each into the indentation that we made in our nose and rear courtesy lights. Secure with micro crystal clear. Then take 0402 LEDs and place them into the position for your step lights. I find that it helps if you bend an L into the wire so that they will hang into the locomotive shell. Mount them onto the steps with a dab of micro crystal clear. After dry time, use a screwdriver to conform the wire to the backs of the steps and secure with silicone paint. The wires will be routed this way into the shell and kept as invisible as possible. Use similar procedure for all of your step lights as well as for your ground lights that should go right underneath the engineer and fireman side of the cab. After completing the ground lights, courtesy lights and step lights, our locomotive has 19 LEDs. The function leads and function commons for your headlights and tail lights have been rationalized to 2 wires each. Our classification, number board and beacon lights have been rationalized to 4 wires total, but the courtesy, rear ground and step lights have added another 16 wires, leaving you with a bird's nest of wiring. Don't panic. Just make sure each of the wires is routed to the ceiling of the locomotive or long enough that they can comfortably connect with each other at the top of the locomotive with some slack. Then, join the light colored wires from each function, twist, flux and solder them into parallel. Test frequently to make sure that your solder joints are good and that all LEDs light properly. I like to combine the front 5 LEDs for this function into one parallel circuit behind a single resistor, with rear LEDs forming another parallel circuit behind their own resistor. We will eventually combine the 2 circuits into one parallel circuit, but doing it this way helps to wire management and troubleshooting. Once the resistors are in place, we can combine the function common wires from each of our functions together so that we have only one function common, and that will mean that we finally have only 7 LEDs coming out of our locomotive. One for each of the functions plus a seventh for the function common. As we progress, we'll make sure to plaster our wires to the ceiling with silicone paint. This will help get them out of the way and keep them immobilized and out of danger. With the lighting circuits in your shell rationalized, it's time to move on to installing our decoder. The decoder for today's project is a TCS Wow 121 decoder with motherboard and keep alive. Place some other board on the clips of your motor and let's start by soldering the motor wires on. These are color-quoted with orange for positive, gray for negative. I want to have my trucks and the shell fully detachable from the decoder and from the chassis. I do this using SIP pins. They are available fairly cheaply from eBay and they make easy wire connectors for your install. For the trucks, I cut a row of five SIP pins and push out the middle one. Using brass wire, I make sure that the two SIP pins on either end are soldered together. Then I solder a pair of SIP pins to each wire lead coming from the trucks. Of course, one SIP pin on each of these pairs will bear no current whatsoever. The pair is just simply to strengthen the connection. With the trucks connected, I'm ready to solder my speaker onto the motherboard. We are going to use an iPhone 5 speaker which produces excellent sound and fits right into one of the speaker slots on the Athern frame. With the speaker installed, let's move on to the leads for our lighting functions. We want white, yellow, blue, green, purple, pink, and brown wire leads to represent each of our lighting functions as well as our function common. Once we get these soldered onto the board, we're going to take a row of four SIP pins and a row of three SIP pins. We'll solder the four leads coming out of the front of the board onto the male end of this four set, and then the three leads coming out of the motherboard from the rear will go onto the male ends of the three set. Take the same colors of wire and solder them to the leads in your shell. Blue for function common, white for headlight, yellow for tail light, green for beacon, purple for number board, brown for classification lights, pink for courtesy, and truck lights. Solder the 30 AWG wire to the 36 AWG magnet wire and cover the joint with one 30 second inch shrink tubing. For added protection, I like to super glue quarter inch lengths of one 30 second inch shrink tubing to the ceiling of the shell, one for each function wire. I then thread the 30 AWG wires through the tubing. This shrink tubing will serve as a shock absorber for your want here connections, since it won't be too narrow to allow the shrink tubing through. Once all seven wires are finished, I solder them to the three male ends of the four and three sets of SIP pins, matching the color order and configuration from the chassis. From here, all that's needed is to plug the pins in, reassemble the locomotive, reversing the SIPs from the beginning of the segment. James, you really illustrated in this video how much work it takes to put the LED lights into place. And we've got the finished model sitting in front of us here, but I see the headlights are flashing on and off. Tell me why that is. It's a difference in frame rate and on the camera and shutter speed versus the flashing speed of the LEDs. In order to dim the LEDs, especially for the ground lights and for the step lights, you actually have flash cycles that the LEDs go through. So when that's out of sync with the camera, you see a lot of flashing. And that's why we're going to show you these beautiful still photographs. James spent about four days with me on the bluff and we've had some good barbecue, but we shot a lot of photographs of this locomotive outside and inside to illustrate all the different types of lights that you just saw him install, the number board lights, the beacon lights, the headlights, the stairwell lights, the step lights they call those, and the wheel well lights. There's a lot of LEDs on this locomotive and they look fantastic in these photographs. James, when you say, oh yeah, I think there's, I think there's 21 total LEDs on there. So that's amazing. You've got to love it. You've got a passion for this and thank you very much for illustrating to us on the What's Neat show about the process. So that's this segment of What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got Pete Wallinger in the studio today. Now you'll remember Pete a couple episodes ago where he did eyes on trains where he was painting stencil art on real locomotives before they scrapped them. Well tonight he's going to show us how to do stencil art on a model. This is a way that you could paint your trains either with an airbrush or using stencils like this. It's different than graffiti. It's more of a defined art. So let's check out the process now as we see what Pete does next. It's as simple as getting an exact knife. Cut yourself a stencil. I work in stencil graffiti. I specialize in cutting stencils. I've gone from 10 years of hand cutting to also some laser cutting. But anyway, you can cut yourself a stencil. All you got to do is pretty much lay out your design on the oil board or whatever you can find. And then as simple as just getting an exact knife cut out your stencil. But anyway, I did one that said that's neat, obviously for the show. And tonight I'm going to do a demonstration incorporating my eyes on the side of this beautiful big boy. Yeah, auto carrier. So anyway, we're going to do a little demo of how I use stencils to paint the car. It's a great way. You know, you can even add some little monikers, you know, real quick. Just a little spray paint or if you want an airbrush. I personally like spray paint because that's how I work. Thanks for the canvas, man. This is a great canvas to paint, man. When I got this for me last week, I was like, this week was kind of busy, but I was kind of thinking like, man, I really got to get something for the show. Do a little live demo. But anyway, you can see the signature eyes on the stencil right here. I do these eyes to wake up, you know, anything from a rail car to a wall. I'm going to make sure you mask out a little of the areas right here because of the overspray. That first base coat of this was a little black spray paint. I usually use this as like the negative shape. So I'm going to use this spray paint right here. It's not your hardware store paint. You know, instead of pulling my whole stencil off and trying to align this, just with the white tones, it's got to line it up right. This is the highlight. This will really make this pop. You always really shake up the cans though, these cans. You don't shake them up well. I always like to do a little test spray. If you go a quick way, you know, a lot of people use airbrush. I like spray paint, like I said. This is the highlight. I call this the life layer. You know, eyes are the window to your soul, that's what people say. I believe that. And it's kind of what wakes up the piece. Smell that for like a paint? Yeah, that's for someone. Nice. Okay, do your nose. Go like on a stick. You're going to use like a little nozzle too, like these little guys, because they give a nice light. It's not like that, you know, hardware stuff where you're going to like. So these are specialty nozzles? Yeah, she can get like a big fat. Look at this big fat cap. Yeah, different size spray patterns. All right, that's pretty good. So in other words, spray cans are becoming like an airbrush. You're good. The clip will start right here. I mean, the clip will start whenever you cut it. I know, right? Just you got it, bro. And there he's matching. He's got it, bro. He's got it. I got respect for you in Pacific. Thank you very much for making dope trains. America, baby. And your process of doing this seems like it's a two step, two mask process. You spray on the black, and then you do the whites. And that's how you did your highlights. Three later. Yeah. Now, when you're doing masks like this, you have to think of the whole process in a reverse order in order to get this to come out. Explain the process to us. So I use negative shape, which you see here in the stencils. I use multiple layers of stencils to create the image. So you have the black layer right here, you got the white layer here. You saw me paint this super fast, like the work goes into like cutting and designing the stencils prior to application. It's amazing. It's faster than brushing by hand. It's faster than using an airbrush and doing every circle individually. It's a very shortcut way to do things quickly that anybody can do this to their freight cars. All day. Pete, it's amazing. Tell us what website they can go to to check out your work or is it on YouTube? Yeah, if you want to check out my work, it's at EYEZ. You can see here on this stencil, I'm about to fly to the print train. It's your signature. So yeah, eyes on Instagram or if you want to check out my website or my tech talk, go to EYEZ.ME. I'm trying to get .com, but it's actually EYEZ.ME. So anyway, here's the last stencil. I'm going to sign it with my Instagram. Gotta find a good flat area though. Stencils like to be in a flat area, but anyway, yeah, we're going to do a quick little... That's amazing, Pete. Thank you for sharing your technique with us on What's Neat. And this is absolutely amazing. So guys, that's this segment with Pete. Can you say that's Neat, Pete? On What's Neat. All of the model railroad products seen in this episode of What's Neat are available through Caboose in Lakewood, Colorado, or order online at mycaboose.com.