 Deluxe materials is well known across the pond in Europe, but they're not nearly as well known in North America. Deluxe materials has so many great products. So let's get on a video call with Deluxe materials founder John Bristow and have him bring us North Americans up to speed about his company and their cool products. So John, for the benefit of those, I may not know, how did Deluxe materials start? We started in 1973 and we were born really out of a need. I was a modular and I got a degree in chemistry and engineering and we sort, we didn't make a real business plan as such and because we were modellers we saw the need for products and because we had the skills to, I think, develop those products with their chemical knowledge we got about and set about a journey to develop a wide range of products. There's over a hundred products in our range today really. So yeah that's how it all begin. No big strategic plan and just almost by accident. You're best known in Europe. Do you have any history in the North American market? The beginnings of the market actually in America which may interest modellers on your side in the US was quite interesting actually because we ended up trying to, we ended up with a product called Super Fatic Glue which actually solved the problems of fumes that come with cyanoacrylate. So this was really an alternative to cyanoacrylate that had no fumes. Some people will find themselves a little bit allergic to cyanoacrylate glues and here was an opportunity really in the air modding. That was the entry point. So what makes Deluxe Materials unique? We've heard this from a number of people actually our distributors in the US. I said you know John what makes you special is the way in which you demonstrate your products either in articles or techniques. One of that a good example actually is this little device. It's on the back of our catalogue which you can get from our and it's actually a glue chart that tells you what materials these are two materials. You select the material you want upon and then you will reference the product with the part number that it can glue. So that's one thing. So helping them choose but we also have some other devices. Here's an example of a wall chart actually again with a railway scene and the various products around the chart direct you to the possible uses for that product. Whether it's sticking ballast down, sticking grass on the fields or whatever you know. So again that's a quick reference chart. So it's something that guides you particularly where your brand is essentially or relatively unknown really in the US. Once you know what product to use then what? I mean you've got to once you've chosen it give the give the modeler a bit of help and in the catalogue again there are there's a story here one on how to use our various waters that we've got we've got a range of water products, solid water, aqua magic and we give you the storylines. So each of these pitches shows you the type of water in its application whether it's still water or maybe a water fall or something like that. We show you which one to use. Good. What are a few examples of some specific products? We've got an example here about card glue for instance. This is a product for bonding card models. I think they're very popular. You've got laser cut models. I think card is also there on the need to bond card stock. So these models can be put together quite cleanly and neatly. And again I think the labelling is the other thing is putting a clarity of what the product does on the front of the label for clean the instant card modeling you know tells you on the label really you haven't got to read it on the back or anything like that. So again making that journey. But I thought it might be quite interesting to show people how this particular product works. Here's a couple of pieces of card stock. One of the things you can do here is run a tiny piece of the glue and with this glue this card glue less is more so the less you use the better it works. So you can bring two pieces of card together like that and they stick instantly. Amazing. It means you can get on with your model. In fact this particular model that I just showed you we did some tests. We built seven of those models in the time it took with Rocket card glue this model. Seven of them you know and in the time it took to build one with PVA glue right we were able to build seven. Another clever product we've got is tacky wax. Wow what's that? Tacky wax. It's a sticky wax actually and people don't know what it does but it needs some understanding. There's a great one actually for holding on to screws. So you can actually grab your screws and you can put screws down where you want. So small pieces you might pop in the bottom you just pick them up. So it's one of those handy little things. I think everyone in America should have one of the tacky wax on their workbench. It's your hero product really. John that's amazing. Any specific products to model railroading? We decided that cleaning the track and we thought we needed to develop some special technology that would be proprietary and actually fun enough as you know Joe we actually developed a product with a 1.9 dielectric constant. We looked at the technology in that area and we came up with a product which not only clean the track but left an invisible conducting film on the surface right and in the kit that comes with this you have a cleaning swab, little brushes to get between the points and stuff like that and such was a demand we've actually had to launch a bigger bottle of that product here in the United States. It's a 250 mil bottle which is available from all good hobby shops really but I think well how does this work? The idea really was when we looked at the grime and the dirt that was coming off the underside combined with the dust that's falling onto the track you end up with quite a toxic concoction that's inhibiting the conduction of electrolytes and we looked at some chemical tools also that would stop the sparking or the micro sparking that interferes with the that you were talking about too. That same chemistry comes and is used in commercial aviation fuels and things like that but it is unique technology so we put all that together. The idea was that once you clean the track actually leave a conducting film that protects the track further so the idea of loosening the dirt and having something that releases the dirt was a key thing and there's a little demo we show people at the show I'll just show you what we've got here are two bottles one with a conventional track cleaner on the left here and one which is track magic which has got the 1.9 dielectric constant and this is the dirt that we found we synthesized that from our using our chemical capability so if you actually drop you can see the dirt doesn't really disperse whereas in the track magic dissolves the dirt away so the idea is to get hold of that loosen it absorb it and take it away and as the track magic evaporates it actually leaves a chemically bonded not an oily service a chemically bonded material on the surface of the track to protect the track going forward how do we know it's there well actually we took that track and we put it we basically put it in short water and we looked at the track after two weeks of totally immersion and these were the results actually so the row which was untreated right actually show heavy corrosion marks whereas the track magic track was almost corrosion free this is over salt water so highly aggressive test really you wouldn't want to normally subject your our way track to salt water but that was that proved the existence of a chemically bonded film that's what we wanted to really know that chemical that we put into the track magic was working at that service level really what about product safety as we'd always started a journey with some of the you know alternatives or making safer products with products like super fatty we we continued that thing and we have some very good examples here for instance plastic balloons we know these are volatile right these are liquid cement so we developed our own bottle we thought because the neck of the neck of the bottle I thought was quite important to stop evaporative emissions and we ended up with a product which had very very good solvency but it had one in breath one advantage you can evaporate anywhere near as quickly and we showed this we illustrate that really with some evaporative tests on that journey we discovered some really interesting chemicals being force in yourself to do something that's not easy was took us on a journey and we discovered another product another called the which we've launched now in the US called plastic magic 10 second cement this is packaged in a similar way but this is even even less evaporative if that is almost close to zero you know obviously it does evaporate eventually and it's been a real success in Asia and we decided to put it into North America this is actually non-glowable what we knew if we're coming into plastic modeling we needed a very very good putting and we again talking to modulus we knew that they're working with solvent based putters sticky shrank and I thought now we can do better than this and so we've made a formulation really it's a water-based part of this there is a touch of shrinkage but nowhere near as much as these solvents and of course you can put it on with your finger wet your finger and smooth it across and just paint it and it polishes up like a piano key John those products are just awesome lots of things in the pipeline you know we just launched a product here this year called looks like glass this we had the formulation ready just before Christmas and we put it through all the health and safety stuff and it came out harmful and I thought oh no we can't launch this and we were literally about six weeks before the Nuremberg toy fair so we sat down and took me about three days and we come up with a non- harmful formulation for that it's a fluid that you dip your small plastic pieces in and it makes them look like glass if they've been scratched or something like that another of your products that looks intriguing is called liquid gravity yeah it is actually I forgot to mention that earlier we we people are asking us for a waiting system right for both the scowl model aircraft people and the railroad people but there's a lot of railroad builders that want to add weight to their their local or whatever or their wagon and lead of course is the common way of doing that we weren't prepared to do that that's totally a case we will be that's outlawed as a retail product in the UK and we it needed to be poured into small cabbages so we've ended up with a product here that bottle actually weighs a quarter of a kilo you know so that's that's you know people say whoa what's this John this has been great one final question what about the future yeah so what we're doing in the future I think what's our plans and ask a strategic plan well I think I think we want to continue along the two things we want to continue along the environmental thing really and using you know constantly searching for new safer chemicals and improving our environmental impact but more importantly I think we eventually want to I think win the hearts of minds of the North American model really to be respected for what we do to be talked about where models meet in clubs and things like that and we we are quite proud of what we want to do but we want to take pride in helping people enjoy their hobby look out for us and buy our products from your local hobby shop and they're distributed by Horizon by Hobby Time and by Wolfers and please support your hobby shop and I'll say cheerio and thank you for listening in