 Hi, I'm Dino Coombs and November's 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 2020. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we've got a great show. We start out the show with two scenery segments, very short segments. The first on how to make simple bushes for your layout that grow along the main line. And the second on how to make Swaharo cactus. There's beautiful plants that you see out in the desert southwest. We also have a great run-by by Steven M. Conroy in modeling ideas from above. And then James Regear does a segment where he edited the video completely from start to finish on how he installed sound and special effects lighting into a Broadway-limited trackmobile. It's a very interesting video. It's a very actually complicated project, but James makes it seem very simple and attainable where almost any of us could do that project. And with that, I'd like to thank all the folks out there that watch the What's Neat this week show that we create for YouTube, where we keep you updated every week on the newest latest news in the hobby, the greatest hobby in the world of model rariting. And so with that, let's continue on with the rest of this month's show, November 2020 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I want to talk about something really simple that's usually overlooked on layouts. And that's simple bushes, you know, the honeysuckle, the wild growth that we see growing trackside. And a lot of folks over the years, we've seen folks use this lichen or sometimes it's called lichen. You get this in a bag. It's usually colored green. And I've had great success using this. When I did the 2002 Wathers catalog cover a long time ago, I used this and literally created hills full of this representing bushes and trees along the main line and the hills. And lichen works really well. Another thing that we've seen folks use over the years is they've take poly fiber and then they simply sprinkle ground foam over it and they make those puffball type bushes and they decorate their entire layout with that. Well, I discovered a product a few years back made by Bachman and that is in their Scenic Escapes line of scenery. And that was these wire armatures that have got the foliage already on them. And I've used it. I've got some photographs here that I'm going to show you. It actually looks good right out of the package. And of course, these are all twisted wire bushes of different sizes with different branch structures. And again, they look good right out of the package, but I figured a way to actually make them look more improved and more realistic to represent honeysuckle and the type of stuff that we see growing here in Missouri. What I do is I take the flocking and I actually pull it right off of them. And I end up with these wire armatures and that's what you can see right here. There's various different sizes of wire armatures. And then what I like to do is I like to take the poly fiber material that Bachman poly fiber in this case and I spread it around on the armatures you see right here. Once I've got it pulled on, I simply take off little clumps and I attach it to the armature, which I'm going to do right here to the last branch that I've got to do on this bush. And you make them one at a time. And then you spray it with hairspray. I've got the old trusty Aquanet hairspray. And I spray it a little bit just to get it all nice and sticky. And then I like to cover it up with just a little bit of ground foam right out of the container. I'm going to do that for you here just to show you the way I do it. These different colors, lighter colors, darker colors, vary it out. And on the darker trees put a little bit of yellow on. And then I hit it with a little bit more hairspray. And then often what I do is I take a pair of scissors and I'll trim it out to make sure each branch has got the individual look. And what happens is I've used hundreds, probably thousands of these on my layout and in various scenes. Let me show you what I'm talking about. Here's some photographs of the bluff that I live on. And for the bluff scene, I used thousands of these to represent the type of vegetation that grew between five, eight and 10 feet tall along the right away and along the bluff. I've used it on various parts of my layout. And the final product here, some finished ones here just for an example that I stuck on this piece of foam. They last forever. If your cat or your pet jumps up on the layout and flattens them out, they're very easy to straighten and fix. They last forever. They're bulletproof. And I think it's a great way to make scenery for any type of a layout that represents the Midwest where all the deciduous green stuff is growing all the time. Plus, it would probably work good, you know, out in a Western arid area to use the smaller armatures and treat them with a different color of vegetation. So it's just a scenery tip, something I wanted to talk about on this segment of What's Neat, a very easy way to make individual wire armature bushes for your layout very quickly. And they look very realistic. They're great for foreground scenery. I think it's just a good idea and it works for me very well. So that's something I want to share with you on this three minute segment of scenery for What's Neat. Hello, this is Michael Gross and you're watching What's Neat with Ken Patterson. For this segment of What's Neat, I want to talk about cactus. And what am I talking about? I'm talking about the old Arizona, the dry Swaharo cactus, those great big tall cactus. Now when I was a kid, back in third or fourth grade, my grandparents always got these magazines called the Arizona Highways Magazine and this one is from 1958 and it was my first exposure to the great big tall cactus. And this is what I'm talking about right here. You've seen these along the Santa Fe or Southern Pacific Main Lines in Arizona and I've got a few photographs of the prototype that I'll share with you and I always thought of different ways on how to make those cactus. I've seen some folks use green pipe cleaners and simply bend them up into the shape of the plant itself and it works really well. So when surfing the internet and studying the idea, I came up with the thought of using this bakeable clay. It's called Super Sculpty Clay and you put it in the oven and you bake it and it gets hard and it's really easy to work with and it's perfect as you pull it out of the box here. You can see what it looks like for simply making Swaharo cactus. Travis Hanshrong shared with us these photographs that we featured on podcast number 72 where he used a few different types of tools to create these beautiful Swaharo cactus, different sizes. These are an HO scale. He actually built a very beautiful diorama and he took it to a whole new level and what I'm going to show you today is a little bit more basic but it's the general idea on how to do this. And all you simply do is sit there and knead it and in this case I'm rolling it on the tabletop surface here and then you just bend it and attach it where it would belong and you form the basic shape of the cactus plant. Now of course it's soft until you bake it and this is a Swaharo cactus that I made an O scale for a project using that clay and baking it in the oven and painting it green. Now you've got to ask how did I get the furrows, those lines on the cactus like I did. I simply used a razor saw in this case and I drew the saw along the wet clay while it was still soft creating all the lines in the plant and then after it was baked I drilled a hole in it and put a needle in it so I could simply stick it in the foam and in this case use it for William's O scale photos that I did for Bachman as a simple prop. Well it's come to my attention and we learned this on the What's Neat This Week podcast a few months back where a company called ZYX Creative has come out with 3D printed Swaharo cactus in HO scale and I've got some of those right here to share with you. I've actually photographed these outside up close so you can see the great detail that went into these plants. They look absolutely convincing and they would lend themselves perfectly to any type of a desert scene. You've seen me shoot desert scenes in the past where I've shot video of trains running through the desert with the purple mountains in the far-distance background and that's the one thing that was always missing from the video shots that I did was these beautiful type of cactus that you see right here so check it out something to think about you can make your own out of clay of course you could do the old pipe cleaner trick if you wish or you can order the ones that you see before you right here by going to zyxcreative.com and get yourself some HO scale beautiful Swaharo cactus and so that's this modeling tip this minute for What's Neat. Hi I'm James Regear and for this segment of What's Neat I'm going to be talking about the project I did to update this Broadway Limited Imports track mobile to DCC with tsunami 2 sound and LED lighting. In early April James Wright posted on Facebook that Lombard hobbies in Chicago was having a clearance sale and he was considering purchasing this track mobile which was the last one they had in stock. This was the DC only version and James was looking for someone who could convert it ideally with light and sound. I saw an irresistible challenge in this project it was much smaller than any locomotive I'd attempted to date which meant I would have to learn new techniques and methods to install decoders speaker and LEDs while minimizing the spatial requirements. I sought to learn whatever I could about the prototype I visited the track mobile website which contained numerous photos of various models of the track mobile including the wide cab version that closest resembles the bli model and we talked about it frequently on What's Neat this week in model railroading there were several viewers who reached out with prototype photos and videos. After consultation with James Wright we chose the TSU-1100 tsunami 2 decoder from Soundtracks. This is the only decoder that came with the Cummins industrial diesel sound pre-installed on its GE sound set. Now George Bogatuck has been a great partner in this project giving me advice as well as helping me design a stay alive for this track mobile. I carefully dismantled the track mobile and looked for the best place to hide the decoder. The model railroad hobbyist install had made use of the channel between the wheel sets to house the decoder so I wondered if I could do the same with the TSU-1100. Unfortunately the decoder was just a little bit too wide to fit the space meaning that the cab would be the only option. This presented a new set of challenges. First hiding my work would be nearly impossible as all sides of the cab had windows. Second BLI had mounted a 0.65 ounce weight in the ceiling of the cab that I would have to remove to accommodate the decoder. Removing the weight was not a problem but I had to think about where I could replace it and there was not much space. Committing to sound meant finding a place to put the speaker. The best location that I found was in the frame of the track mobile between the wheel sets. The speaker could fire down onto the track using reverberation from the layout for amplification. Mauser electronics had a 12 by 6 millimeter cell phone speaker commonly used for an earpiece and that would fit the bill nicely and I designed the baffle in blender. Blender is a powerful open-source software suite for 3D graphics design that is available for most platforms. Although donations are encouraged the software is free for download and use. I started off by creating a cube and setting its dimensions to match those of the speaker at 12 by 6 by 2 millimeters. Next I created a cube to represent the exterior dimensions of the speaker box. I set the speaker box depth at 4.5 millimeters. I wanted one millimeter of material on each side of the speaker at the opening of the box so I set the final exterior dimensions of the box at 14 by 8 by 4.5 millimeters. Once I had the exterior dimensions established I created a third cube to represent the speaker box's cavity or reverberation chamber. I wanted the speaker to have a footing of 0.5 millimeters on each side to prevent it from sliding too far back into the chamber on assembly. This meant a length and width of 11 millimeters by 5 millimeters. I wanted the rear wall of the speaker to be one millimeter thick. So for the final dimensions of the speaker cavity I wanted 11 meters by 5 millimeters by 3.5 millimeters. Finally with all the cubes created I stacked them in blender making sure that they were properly centered on the X and Y axes and in proper alignment on the Z axes for speaker chamber depth. I made sure that the cube representing the speaker protruded one millimeter from the front of the speaker. Once everything was properly stacked I used the Boolean Exclude function to first remove the space of the speaker from the speaker box followed by the space of the reverberation chamber and I was left with a millimeter exact image of the speaker box I had in mind. I converted the file to STL format that my printer slicer could read and after making sure that everything was aligned properly I printed the baffle on my Dremel Idea Builder. The baffle came out to be exact in its dimensions. So precise that when I press fit the speaker to it the fitting was so snug that no adhesive or additional measures to seal the fit were required. The assembled speaker itself was a perfect fit for the available space so I used double-sided tape to attach the speaker box to the back of the decoder bay on the track mobile. I then perforated the plastic bottom of the bay with a number 68 drill. For this project I needed five lighting functions including forward and reverse headlights road hazard lights and two strobes still one more than I had available then I thought about a recent project where I added a four LED prime strato-light beacon to a GP35. I accomplished this using an Atmel a tiny 13 microcontroller chip. The rotary beacon of course used a single lighting function on the decoder that was set to constant bright. There is a what's neat segment in the works for this project too. The strobe lights on a locomotive are normally controlled with one switch therefore it would be an ideal usage for the Atiny 13 chip. The microcontroller with up to six programmable pins it uses the same programming code as an Arduino and a properly configured Arduino can be used to upload that code from a computer so first I had to hash out the strobe flash sequence on the Arduino before I could upload it to the Atiny 13. I wanted to program a sequence for two LEDs so that they would each do a double flash be off for about a second and repeat. Now in a prototypical setting a pair of flashing strobes is almost never synchronized. One is always flashing at a slightly faster rate than the other. To replicate this I wanted to set the off time for one of the strobes at 950 milliseconds with the other at 1000 milliseconds. The two strobes would thus be in sync to start with but have to go through 20 cycles before being in sync again. The most basic program for Arduino is called blink. First the user chooses a pin to activate with a four line sequence of code. The first line turns the LED on, the second delays a certain amount of time, the third turns the LED off, and the fourth delays a certain amount of time. The Arduino will repeat the sequence again and again as long as it has power. We're animating a single strobe or even multiple strobes if they're on the exact same sequence, something similar to blink would suffice. On, delay 100 milliseconds, off delay 80 milliseconds, on delay 100 milliseconds, off delay 1000 milliseconds. For two strobes that are slightly offset from each other however, this does not work very well because the delay function instructs the Arduino to wait and do nothing else for the duration. Instead I had to set variables for each LED and calculate on time and off time based on millis or the Arduino's internal timer. Then using a sequence of if else statements I instructed the Arduino when to turn each LED on or off. Now this all resulted in a somewhat convoluted code, especially for a programming novice like myself. I struggled with the problem for about a day and then I finally asked my wife Allison for help. Allison codes professionally as a bioinformaticist and she had the coding figured out and running within two minutes. Once I had the desired coding working with the Arduino I created a new copy of the sequence, adjusting the pins to match what I had available on the ATiny13. I then used the instructions I found online, I'll provide a link in the article, to reconfigure the Arduino into programming mode so that I could write the coding to the ATiny13 chip. This meant soldering wires to the leads of the ATiny13, mounting it to a breadboard and connecting the ATiny13 pins to the appropriate pins of the Arduino. I flashed the coding to bring the Arduino into programming mode, connected the appropriate terminals between Arduino and ATiny13 and once I had everything set I flashed the bootloader sequence to the chip followed by the dual strobe programming I created. I then desoldered the ATiny13 and set it aside for the later installation. Some of the more technical aspects worked out it was time to prepare the model for installing LEDs. This meant drilling holes through the body in each location I wanted to install an LED. Because the body was cast metal I was sure to use plenty of oil to lubricate the drill bit. When dealing with styrene I prefer the precision of drilling by hand but metal is a much slower process to drill so I found that putting a precision chuck into the chuck of my power drill helped expedite things and make the process more tolerable. Even so I took my time eased off the pressure and let the drill do the drilling. I still broke a few bits in the process but taking a low pressure approach really helped those tiny bits last longer than expected. Using a number 78 drill bit I bored holes through the center of each headlight molding. I countersunk then each hole with the number 68 bore drilling so far into the wall as I could without going through to the other side. I stopped frequently to check my progress and make sure I was not drilling all the way through. I hope that the countersink would minimize potential contact between the exposed ends of the LED wires and body of the track mobile. I followed the same procedure for each headlight and tail light. To drill out the headlights and tail lights on the rear of the track mobile I found it helpful to remove the rear walkway and stairs. It is a separate piece from the rest of the frame held in by two pins. Gentle pressure on those pins will allow it to separate. I also removed the top step from either side of the walkway since the hole coming out of the rear tail light was in direct alignment with the top step and I did not want to drill through the steps. For the strobe lights I first used wire cutters to clip off the strobe moldings. I then drilled into the mounts with my number 78 drill bit until I came through the cab roof. For this part I was careful to make frequent stops to check my progress. Because of the thickness of the cab wall the bore on either side was nearly perfect alignment to hit the cab window moldings. I did not want to drill into the windows. Once the number 78 hole was through I followed up with the 116th inch bore through the strobe mounts. Because I had a number 78 pilot hole the 116th inch bore seemed to go a little bit quicker. As in the other countersinks I wanted to drill as far as possible without boring all the way through the cab ceiling. My idea was to have a hole deep enough to put the LEDs in at the base with 116th inch acrylic tubing cut to size to serve as the diffusers. With that it was time to begin assembling LEDs for installation. This was much like many other projects and I wired up 12 LEDs for the install all 0402 all warm white. After testing the LEDs with three volts of power I was sure to brush the LEDs and leads generously with silicone paint. I allowed the paint to set thoroughly overnight before doing anything else with the LEDs. The aim was to achieve the best possible insulating coating. Once I had allowed the silicone coating to dry I dipped four LEDs into clear red acrylic paint for the tail lights and two into clear orange acrylic paint for the hazard lights. I set these aside until they were dried to the touch which was only a few hours. Meanwhile I remounted the rear steps to the frame of the track mobile and secured it with super glue. I tinted the cab windows with several coatings of clear acrylic smoke to help obscure the electronics that would be going inside. I also mixed some paint together to match the industrial yellow of the car body. I applied it to the decoder with a brush. The goal here was to be able to feature some of the details BLI had put into the cab including the driver without having the view ruined by the electronics. I also coated any exposed metal around where I could be mounting the LEDs with silicone paint. Again I left everything to cure overnight before proceeding. Finally it was time to mount the LEDs to the track mobile. I worked with one function at a time starting with the headlight tail light functions. I initially fed the wires for the headlights and tail lights. Once there was enough wire to grasp with the tweezers I pulled them through the rest of the way. I tried to avoid using too much force in pulling the LED wires since they are definitely vulnerable to breakage and the LED solder joints themselves are notorious for falling apart. Once the wires were through I soldered the matching pairs of headlights and tail lights together into parallel. I then added a resistor to the function common from each. For the tail light pairs I used 20 kilo ohms resistance and for the headlight pairs I used one kilo ohm. I made sure that each resistor and surrounding solder joints was thoroughly covered with shrink tubing as an extra layer of insulation. I then routed the wires so that the anode and cathode wires from the headlight and tail light sets would meet toward the back of the frame where I soldered them into parallel. I made sure that the wires were snug against the sides the track mobile as I routed them where they would not interfere with the screws needed for assembly. Once the underframe wiring was completed for the lighting I made sure that all function common wires were soldered together with a blue 34 awg bus wire. I did the same with each lighting function soldering them to the appropriate color of 34 awg bus wire. After shrink tubing the solder joints I secured the shrink tubing to the underside of the track mobile frame using super glue. I wanted to minimize movement because I knew that getting all these wires routed into the cab would create a pinch and pull on the wires and I wanted to minimize breakage. After all all of the wires had to be routed behind the motor underneath the motor hood and into the cab and all of this was a very tight fit. This left one major issue to address with the track mobile and that was its unreliable performance on turnouts. I knew I didn't really have space for a conventional stay-alive capacitor but I wondered if I might manage to cobble one together by wiring a few capacitors together and hiding them in plain sight under the frame of the track mobile. I asked George Bogotok for recommendations and he suggested I try soldering 425 volt 220 micro farad capacitors together in parallel which could provide a second or two of emergency power. Initially I thought I might be able to hide the capacitors in plain sight as oversized air tanks if I painted them into armor yellow to match the track mobile. Now as it turned out they were too bulky to look even remotely convincing and I had to remove the struts for the wheels because they would make the whole assembly too wide to accommodate. I decided to instead move the capacitors to the interior of the frame right against the motor casing and then I mounted the road wheels to the outside of capacitor. Now to make everything removable for service I decided to use hot melt to secure the capacitors and wheels to the sides of the track mobile. And because the wheels were now on the outside of the capacitors the whole effect looked much better and more convincing. The next step was to secure the decoder to the ceiling with double-sided tape. I was careful to route the wires from the strobes around the decoder. These two strobe wires of course were going to be attached to the ATiny13 chip. Whereas the decoder uses a positive function common the ATiny13 chip uses a common ground meaning that I had to wire the cathode wires into parallel and to a one kilo ohm resistor which I in turn soldered to the ground pin of the chip. I soldered the function wires from the decoder directly to that pin. I soldered the two anode wires from the LEDs to respective poles in the ATiny chip. I soldered a one kilo ohm resistor to the anode pole of the ATiny chip with the function common soldered on the other side of the resistor. It was very important to make sure that the ATiny chip did not receive too much voltage because much like an LED it would go up in smoke. That it was time for final assembly. All wires coming from the frame had to pass around the rear of the motor underneath the motor hood and into the cap. This meant that with the motor wires three lighting functions a stay alive, truck power, and a speaker I was having to feed 12 wires through a relatively narrow cavity. Making matters worse the motor hood assembly closes tight to the track mobile frame right where it meets the rear wall of the cap. So in order to allow the wires to pass through I used a file and dremel to open up a gap. Now all of this would be relatively hidden from view because it's under the skin of the motor hood. Once the wires were successfully routed around the motor and into the cap I soldered the light colored wires together making sure to cover each solder joint with shrink tubing. In order to facilitate maintenance I used one millimeter pitch headliner pin and plug sets to make the motor, track power, and speaker unpluggable. After successfully testing the track mobile it was time to close the motor hood and tighten the screws for final assembly. And then the final test where I kept my fingers crossed the test of the fully assembled track mobile on the tracks. I wanted to make sure that no wires had somehow gotten pinched as I closed that motor hood and screwed everything down tight. And with a successful test the track mobile was complete. All of the model railroad product seen in this episode of What's Neat are available through Caboose in Lakewood, Colorado or order online at mycaboose.com