 Hi, I'm Mike Buddy, and May's What's Neat This Week starts right now. This is What's Neat for May 2017. I'm your host, Ken Patterson, and this month for the show's lineup, Jeff Meyer stops by and shares with us some freight cars that he's building for Model Rail and Hobbyist Magazine's Toma Layout Project. And then later in the show, Mike Buddy stops by and shares with us some of his magnificent auto racks, he brings a complete auto rack train and shares with us tips on the design of the train and even what the concepts are and why they even run auto rack trains the way they run them. So he gives us a little background on that this month. Later in the show, I demonstrate how to make winter scenery using leaves, various types of ways to create scale leaves, an HO scale or O scale to use on our layouts. And then at the end of the show, George Bogatok from Soundtrack stops by and he shares with us a knowledge of information that he has about the new Sonomi 2 diesel decoder. Now you'll recall two months back, we went over the entire parameters of the Sonomi 2 steam decoder, but this month George is going to teach us everything that we need to know about the diesel decoder, how to program it and set it up. I'm telling you, we're really going to get good at this stuff. So with that, that's the lineup for this May 2017 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, it sure has been a crazy winter in between snow storms and temperatures in the 60s and dropping back down into the 20s. We've had some incredible winds and today I open up my door and what do I see? I see all my neighbor's leaves staring at me. Am I upset? No, not at all. This is great scenery material for modeling late summer, winter or fall. Delivered to my door. If you study prototype leaves and you look through a forest, you'll notice that the undergrowth is constantly covered with leaves so much so that only the heartiest of vegetation can grow through. And that's what this material is good for. Delivered to my door and ready to go. Let's take this into the shop and let's process this and let me illustrate and show you quickly how you can model great undergrowth for winter scenes or fall scenes on your model railroad layout. The first step in the process of creating our winter ground covers, I take the leaf material and I'm putting it in this household blender and then I want to fill it up with water because if I don't put water in here, it's not going to grind up. You need the water to help move things around. Now I'm going to do this for about a minute. Use the highest speed that the blender's got. I'm heating the process over and over again until I get enough material. I don't have to do it that often. So I'm going to have enough material here so I can do it one time and this second batch really ground up real nice. This is much finer. This looks good. So now I'm going to go take all of this to the oven and let it bake for about 300 degrees or 250 degrees for about an hour until it all completely dries out. I'm going to dump this out onto this screen which is actually a splash screen for frying pan. You could also use a colander for that. Pan is hot and what I want to do is I've got this colander from the grocery store and the openings in it I measured these is about a 30 second of an inch. So it's a pretty coarse screen. And what we want to do is we want to sift our freshly baked leaves through this screen so that I get some good HO scale size leaves. And all we simply do is just do what, shake it a little bit and what I get is this fantastic material that all scales out to about the right size. Now with regards to baking temperature I have found that it's best to bake the leaves at about a temperature of 200 degrees. If you get too much higher than that what happens is you start to burn them and it'll darken the color on them which will give you more of a weathered leaf look if you're modeling that summer season where you still have the undergrowth. But primarily for fresh fallen leaves I like them still to have the original leaf color. So that's how I do this segment. Now what we need to do is apply this to a scene real quick and I'll show you how easy and how dramatic it makes a scene look. Back in 1993 I used the ground up fine leaves on the Midwest Valley modelers layout where they were sprinkled underneath the trees and onto the roads and roofs of buildings to create the late summer early fall theme of the layout. Simply apply the sifted leaves onto the layout in the areas where you are planning dense tree growth. Tease the leaf material with an artist brush to allow the underlying vegetation to stand up as the leaves settle evenly in the area. Once your trees are in place the dry leaves create an effect that just looks right. I chose wire trees for this demonstration but I really love the yellows and oranges of fall and will eventually add these full color trees to the scene whereas it'll add bright colors along with maybe grinding up some yellow and orange leaves to put onto the ground. This ground leaf material also looks great in summer scenes that's pretty much how I did do it on the Midwest Valley modelers layout whereas the forest floor is always covered with leaves year round. Now let's say that you wanted to change a scene on your layout and you still have these leaves and they weren't glued into place you can simply vacuum them up by using a coffee filter on the end of your vacuum hose and by stuffing this filter in and turning the machine on it will capture all of the dry leaf materials safely in the filter turn the vacuum cleaner off and then simply let the material drop onto a piece of paper so that you can put it back into a container for future reuse on the layout. Another way to make leaves is by using a leaf punch from the Green Stuff World website. I ordered one of these and tried it out on both paper and dried leaves. It easily punches out leaves of various shapes measuring about nine inches in HO scale so it may lend itself well to S scale or O scale scenery projects. Now in my opinion sill floor makes some of the most realistic looking leaf material. The colors and the shapes are very believable. If you look at the model railroad hobbyist magazine's blog you will find Tom Johnson's Logan's Port and Indiana Northern Railroad. Not only is Tom a master backdrop creator, he also uses sill floor leaves effectively in a super detailed foreground scenes on roads on the roof of buildings. It just simply makes his scenes look magnificent and with that that ends this scenery segment on What's Neat. Alan and you're watching What's Neat with Ken Patterson. It's tax season and I see Jeff Meyer. Hey Jeff man what are you shooting on this beautiful day? I feel like I always say that but it's it's just crazy. Look at these models. What do you got going on here today? It's three freight cars for the MRH Toma layout. They're gonna take a small layout I think from what Joe Fugate was saying. Take them to some train shows and stuff on display and they asked a few of us from the weathering shop to weather some freight cars for them so they gave me three Atlas cars of those are the ones I picked. Just a hopper, a tank car and a box car. Not much too much going on the tank car but this hopper turned out pretty nice as did the seaboard system box car that's patched. Man I love it when you come over here you always got some of the best-looking models. Well man Jeff thank you for sharing this with us on What's Neat. This is some pretty cool stuff going on here. Thank you. I had Mike on the show in a good seven months because he's kind of been building a lot of 125th scale cars. I understand he's building a Verdi pack for that and it's kind of kept him occupied for the last six months. Now if you remember a while back we had a video called This is Nuts. That's the one video I think that's almost close to 600,000 hits where Mike and Joe Steinman and the guys set up a whole lot of dioramas in the backyard and then ran an auto rack train full of beautiful automobiles Pacers Gremlins you name it. You know the video I'm talking about if you've seen that. Well Mike's back again tonight with some more beautiful models that he's built in auto racks so I want to hand it over to Mike and let him share with you some of his art that he's got for us on What's Neat. Yeah we're under a little bit more controlled situation this time weather wise. We're set up on Ken's layout here. This train represents a loaded auto rack train pulling finished vehicles from the factory and returning empty auto parts boxcars to the vendors. So one thing I always get asked about on these trains is the telephone company vehicles and I retired from Southwestern Bells a year ago and spent 37 years there so I have a lot of telephone vehicles on my auto racks and after this is over with I'll show you what I used to make those trucks. So have a look at this train. Wanting some station wagons I took these classic metal works Chevy and Pallas 1978 model made a master of a station wagon and then I cast them in resin and used scotch tape for the windows painted them and that's what I use in a lot of my auto racks just to give it a little more variety. Now another thing I recently did was I made a two-door version of this same car so I'll be able to mix those in as well but just something else to spice up my auto racks. Alright so so the way it works was the empty auto racks and the full auto parts cars would be going into the plant and the plant would unload all the auto parts out of the auto parts boxcars meanwhile they're building vehicles loading the finished vehicles on the auto racks so when the train goes out of the plant the auto racks are full of new vehicles and the auto parts cars are empty and usually these the racks and the boxcars were assigned in pools and they would run back and forth on the same route all the time you know you might have a Frisco boxcar on southern Pacific rails it was assigned to a pool in California that never even ran on its own rails the railroads all contributed a little bit towards the maintenance of these rail cars rather than trying to keep track of their own cars they would just pull each other's cars and use them and I guess pay each other. Yes so all this didn't depend on stick with specific railroads it was basically a mixed match of different. You didn't always have Missouri Pacific cars on the Missouri Pacific rails. Okay a lot of times it worked out like that but more often than not the cars were mixed and they were just assigned to certain trains all the time so that's the way that worked. As far as these bell trucks go I got some of the original paint when I was working there and I'm sure you can have it mixed it's called communications gray green so that's what I painted the bottoms of the vans with actually I paint a whole van so I paint the white over the top of it and I made my own decals on a copy machine but now some friends of mine with printers made some real quick decals that are easy to use. As far as the stripes go this is some actual tape from the trucks back in the day this is like 35 years old and it's actually reflective scotch light from the sides of the real trucks that they use so I cut thin strips apply it to the sides of the vehicle so when you know it goes behestalite it reflects just like the real trucks and that always attracts a lot of attention so I hope you enjoyed the run-by and we'll see you next time. This next segment of What's Neat I've got George Bogatec setting up to do a demonstration on the Sonami 2 diesel decoder he's in St. Louis to do a clinic at Mark Twain hobby he gave a very very thorough presentation for almost an hour and a half long on both the diesel and the steam decoder from the Sonami 2 line of decoders that are brand new from Soundtracks and he's here today so George tell us about the diesel decoder. Alright so now that we've set up our steam locomotives now we're going to show you how to set up some of the same features in our diesel decoder. First thing we need to do this is a 567 non-transition but it's not the right one because this is an E8 and it's got dual prime movers so we need to select the bright prime mover so the good news is again you don't have to spend hours downloading this off of the computer we simply change the CV so in this case we're going to program CV 123 and according to the chart on our users on our website at soundtracks.com under the manuals tab you'll see the sound selection chart for the EMD decoder and you'll notice that choice number 3 is going to be the dual 567 so we're going to set this to a value of 3 and you're going to instantly hear it change there's prime mover number 1 and there's prime mover number 2 so now we've got this correct so now we're going to select our horn and bell just like we did with the steam decoder and that's again CV 120 for the horn and 122 for the bell and the diesel decoder you have 42 different air horns to choose from and in the and you also have 12 bells to choose from and again you can go through pick one that that matches so first let's listen to the bell so that's a pretty fast ring rate but it's pretty good let's try a different one okay we're getting close let's try a different one here that's same bell the fast ring rate that's probably a good sound for that locomotive so now let's pick the air horn that's actually probably correct so we'll go ahead and leave that one but you would change CV 120 to pick the air horn that matches your model and now we're going to set up our dynamic digital exhaust or DDE as we did in the steam this allows the prime mover to notch up or down and also intensify based on how hard the locomotive is working nothing's worse than losing control of your locomotive when you're doing your switching so the DDE processor does the sounds for you so to do this we're going to program CV 2.503 when the locomotive is moving forward at about speed step one and then we're going to program CV 2.504 when the locomotive is moving forward at about speed step 20 and we're going to set those to 255 so the decoder will internally auto calibrate how much energy the motor is needing to move the locomotive by itself light on flat level track and then the DDE processor will take over so when you pulling a heavier train or when you encounter a grade the DDE processor will then take over and notch the prime mover accordingly so let's start so let's start moving the locomotive at speed step one now to do this we're going to set CV 32 to a value of 2 and this is the 2. part of CV 2.503 then we program CV 503 as we normally would in our cab we enter a value of 255 and now the decoder has calibrated the minimum amount of energy that's needed to move this locomotive when it's light so now we're going to speed the locomotive up to about speed step 20 I'm going to hold it here since we have a short limited amount of track we're going to program in this case now we're going to program CV 504 and we're going to set it to 255 and before I press the enter button we're going to go ahead and let the locomotive go so that the decoder will let it run okay now it's settled in we hit the enter button now the decoder is programmed so now we stop our locomotive now the last thing that has to be done is the calibration for sensitivity and that's in CV 2.512 this is a range from 0 to 255 like it was in the steam decoder and gives you the amount of how sensitive the decoder is to changes in the load on the motor we typically start it fairly low so we're going to program this and that's CV 2.512 so we're going to program 512 since 32 is still set to 2 we're going to set we're going to start it somewhere around 35 and we're going to see how it does so now when we move our locomotive you can kind of hear the process or kick in but we'll hold it and you can hear the prime mover really notching in now that I've got some load against it and then when I release it you hear the throttle back off now this is a better effect of course once you have a train behind you but to show the effect I put my hand in front of it and you can play with the sensitivity to match your railroad and your locomotives so that they'll work together well so now that we've adjusted our DDE we're going to implement braking like we did with our steam engines so first we add a little bit of momentum CV 3 and 4 just to simulate a little bit of heavy train behind the locomotive and also the massive itself but then we've set braking rates into CVs 117 and 118 so we have our independent brakes so we're going to move forward then we're going to set our independent brake we're going to use F11 you hear the squealing coming from the brakes on the locomotive we're going to change directions we're going to release our brakes you hear the air bail off and then we're going to go pick up the passenger car like we did in the steam engine so we're getting close we're going to go ahead and do our sets now we're tied in change directions now we're going to add the sound car with F8 four times 1 2 3 4 now on the diesel when we activate train brake mode you're going to hear the prime mover notch up into notch 2 and you hear the compressor cycle as it's simulating the charge of the train line with the prime mover notching up it's turning that compressor faster so it's getting the air into the train and it'll run like that for about 30 seconds so in the essence of time we'll say we're done let's go ahead and move so we're going to go ahead we release our brakes and the train starts to move away and then now we do our set you'll hear the air reduction in the locomotive and you'll hear the squeal coming from the car so that's how easy brakes are to implement and how easy the decoders in the tsunami to product line are to set up and get them running to more closely simulate the work the real railroads are doing now let's see it in action let's see some run buys and see what all this is doing for us so now Ken we're going to show you how you can add that much more fun to your railroad with tsunami 2 so we've got a pair of our E8s here and we're going to pull this this freight train so we're going to get started so the first thing we got is we've got our lights on we're ready to go so now we're going to blow our whistle signal back to throttle pull up you'll hear the