 This is what's neat for May 2016. I'm your host, Ken Patterson, and this month, Ed Richardson comes by with that River Point Station pickup truck that he converted to a radio-controlled vehicle self-propelled in HO scale that runs at scale speed. John Deetson shows us some magnificent drone footage this month, where when we pass through the city, the town, it looks exactly like a model. All of the color treatment and everything that we need to do to make our models look real is in this drone footage this month. Chris Palomeras and Mike Buddy stopped by on Saturday, and we spent about nine hours creating a video for Athern that shows really how Mike Buddy weathers models with oil paints, which is a great mystery to a lot of people. And Mike makes it look really simple, weathering this new series of locomotive from Athern called Ready to Rust series. They've got freight cars and locomotives with patched-out paintwork on them that's really kind of designed for the guy that wants to weather them up and make them look realistic. We also build a BTS train station this month, just a beautiful kit. We do that from start to finish, and we don't exactly end up with what started out as the kit was supposed to be. There was a lot of changes that were made building this one. But for what sneak layout tips this month, I've been working an awful lot on the layout where I've been experimenting some more with LED lights. And this month, I took a lot of my four-foot floors and fixtures from my staging yard area and I replaced these with some old track light heads that accept the screw-in type bulbs. Now, the LED version of screw-in bulbs has dropped to less than $2 apiece, so I thought by pulling these out of the garage and hanging them, it might be a cheap way for me to light up my staging yard. I hung the lights with three-watt screw-in LED bulbs. They produce the equivalent of a 60-watt filament light bulb. So now, the glare of the old shop lights has been eliminated by removing these, and the layout area around the staging and narrow-gauge addition have a more comfortable feel when operating trains. The lighting is even and focused on the models. My staging area runs into my woodshop area in my studio, and this section of the layout was always lit with cabinet puck lights. Well, this week I replaced these lights with a 13-foot strip of LED lights. Now, I attached a one-half-inch corner trim, piece-of-trim work, underneath the cabinets, and I ran this at the full 12 feet that the lights would span. And right over the yard, this would act as a valance, which I would then take hot-milk glue, and I attached the row of lights, which are very lightweight, to the whole length of this piece of wood. Now, this gave me really nice, even, bright, and dimmable lighting right above my staging-slash switch yard, and I really liked the way this came out. So that's this tip for layout construction, experimenting a little bit more with the LED products that keep appearing on the market. So now let's take a peek at that athern video and let's see Mike Buddy do his weathering. I'm Chris Paul-Mars with Athern Model Trains. As part of the March New releases, we're having several Genesis locomotives for both GP38-2s and GP40-2s, one of them being a ready-to-rust. And what ready-to-rust means is, it comes pre-faded with the paint prototypically faded, the patches prototypically applied, and it just requires just a little bit of weathering to finish for your layout. I'm bringing in Mike Buddy and Ken Patterson to help me out with finishing this locomotive. I'm gonna start off with a quick technique on how to put a little weathering on your wheels. For this technique, I'm gonna use a Katie Wheel Cleaner, some Desert Sand Model Masters paintbrush, and what I'm gonna do is apply the Katie Wheel Cleaner to the bottom of the wheels, get the wheels to spin, and apply some paint, getting the paint even on the entire inside of the surface of the wheels. Hi, I'm Mike Buddy. I'm here today to show you some of my weathering techniques on this new Athern locomotive. All right, to get started on this, the first thing I do on locomotives is to remove the handrails. So, we'll get that taken care of right away. They come off really easily. Okay, for the first step on this, we'll be using full strength oil paints, using a technique called dry brushing. And what you do is put a little paint on a paper plate or something. This is just the same thing I've been using for a long time, and wipe most of the paint off on a paper towel, then try and do your streaks as vertically as you can. Vertical streaks are the most important thing. If they're crooked, it's gonna look bad. Now, to make some better streaks on the roof, I'll put just a little bit of thinner in my brush. It also shows the variation, like it's darker at the top, it sort of fades. Now, the reason we're going more in the middle here is because these areas are always cleaner on a locomotive, they're protected a little bit by the extension of the radiator fans and the air filter box. So, there will be more streaks along the edges of these things. Yeah, normally on these weathering jobs, I would start out by spraying a coat of dull coat first to kind of give the paint a little bit of tooth to adhere to, but these locomotives have a really nice flat, like a matte finish on them and the paint takes really, really well to these. When you get your streaks to the point where you like them, one last thing I like to do is to fill in the radiator screens and air filter grills with real thin paint. Last step here while your brush is still full of very thin paint in it, you can go over some of the cracks in the doors, or at least along the tops of them. The paint being as thin as it is will creep down into all of the cracks and highlight the hinges and the latches and stuff. This looks a lot darker than it really is when it dries, it's not quite as bad, so you may have to do it once or twice. So what we've done so far is done some dry brushing to add streaks along the sides and then taking a smaller brush with a little bit more thinner wetter paint and add a few more individual streaks. So we'll let Ken take it over from here, let Ken Patterson work his magic with the airbrush. Now that Mike Buddy has done a magnificent job in the sign of the locomotive, we're gonna put a little bit of a locomotive exhaust on the top of this locomotive. Now I'm gonna be using a spray booth here, so I don't need to worry about for this video wearing my safety equipment, but I do suggest that when you paint using lacquer-based paints that you wear respirators and otherwise safety equipment to keep yourself safe. So right now I've got an airbrush that's full of just a little bit of Model Master's black paint and it's thinned 90% thinner and the rest paint so that I can just put on just a little bit of paint on the top of this exhaust and build it up slowly. That way there's no mistakes and no regrets. So let's turn on the air booth and let's start spraying a little bit of exhaust on the top of this locomotive. Now because the paint is very thin, I can build it up slowly and I won't have to worry about putting on too much or overdoing it. To behalf of Ken Patterson and my buddy, thank you for watching and be sure to go to affin.com for more information on our Genesis GP38-2 and GP40-2 featured in this video. Listen with some more remote control HO scale. He was here a few months ago and he's made a little progress with a River Point station truck and a few others. So, hand over. Thanks Mike, for having me again. All right. Thanks guys. Okay. Once again, like Mike said, this is the River Point station F-250 forward truck and it is fully radio controlled with headlights and proportional speed. And just to give you guys an insight of what it takes to make one of these little guys work, you can look underneath here and see the independent front suspension, which is great for going over road crossings. Also, the gearbox here, differential is installed and a couple other items you could really may not be able to make out is the steering servo on off switch and the charge port. So, those are a few of the things that's required to make it run. And here are some video clips of the River Point station vehicle in action. We purchased these parts like what website would you go to to power this River Point truck like you did? I'd like to go to soleexpert.de, soleexpert.de. SOL, expert, okay. And the River Point station is a perfect platform because they're quite noticeable. You see them on the roads everywhere you go and they're just a perfect fit for those electronics. Right, all right. Now that we've seen this running add up, where'd you say the batteries were in these again? It's a little one sail light bulb stuck it inside the camper shell. It's amazing how small you can get batteries in that today. It is. It's amazing all the small stuff that they can cram into these tiny vehicles nowadays and I guess it's probably only gonna get better, huh? Yeah, I'm steady, you know, looking for a smaller and more advanced parts to put in these little guys. All right, well thanks for coming by, Ed. It's a great seeing you again. It's all right, see you, man. Thanks, Mike. For this segment of building structures for what's neat, I'm building another laser kit and this is a C&O passenger depot from BTS Models and again, I'm not gonna build this exactly the way the kit comes but let me tell you what, this kit does come with some fabulous instructions. If you look at this, the photography, it's like an article unto itself. There's so much you can learn about building laser kits in general just by going through these BTS instructions. So what I've done here is I've got all the parts, again, pre-painted because I've discovered that's the best way to start building these kits. And so I've got the white trim, all painted white in the rafters and the windows. I've got the main walls painted a gray color and instead of using an airbrush, this time I simply took a can of Rust-Oleum primer, darker primer and painted the sides of the walls with that color. So that actually saved a step of mixing paint and using the air spray booth. I also stained the parts that need to be pre-stained and that's the floorboards, the base and just kind of a few parts like the docks, the ore docks, I mean the loading docks of the passenger station. I stained these parts with Minwax Early American Stain. It's just a really nice color and it grays up really well with chalk so I like the way it looks. One other thing I wanna talk about, when I'm building these kits, I like to keep them rather than storing them in their original box. I like to put them in these husky plastic totes. So as you can see here, I've got multiple kits that I'm in the process of building. Here's a freight house, another train station and a water tank. And these boxes simply hold everything, all the parts that are pre-painted and everything, it keeps it together and I can easily see when it's on the shelf what's inside of these. I also like to store my wet white metal parts in them and I haven't really finished any of the white metal parts in the structures I've built this year so far because I'm just gonna spray paint those and work those all at one time. It's a completely different process to work with white metal parts than it is to actually work with wooden kits. So let's build this station and let's see how this one turns out. I'm not exactly sure where I'm gonna put it on the layout yet. I've got two choices, two locations and the way I'm gonna build the station it's not gonna be a C&O station. I'm gonna build it freelanced so that it's gonna fit the area that I want it to fit on on my layout. So let's see how this one goes together. So after thinking about it overnight I really didn't like the shade of gray that I had painted this train station. I just thought it was too dark when I put one of the windows behind it. So today what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna repaint this and I picked up a lighter shade of gray paint. Actually, this is primer. And as you can see it is lighter than what I had painted the structure. So when I put the white trim on it'll just be a little bit more subtle. I took a little 600 grit sandpaper and I sanded the walls. I've already sprayed these with the primer just to make sure the color looked good and I like the way it's looking. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna spray these walls with just a little bit of this primer right out of the spray paint can. I'm not gonna use an airbrush. Usually I would use floccal paint on this probably just primer gray because floccal paint is ground down to such a fine pigment that it goes on models very smooth. Obviously spray paint out of a can with the nozzles, you know this isn't a $200 nozzle like an airbrush that we use. So therefore you can only expect remedial results out of it. But at the same time because I've sanded everything smooth this should go on pretty nice. I'm gonna put it on light. I don't wanna put it on heavy. That's all I'm gonna do right now and I'm gonna let this dry for a few minutes and then I'll continue spraying on more until I get the walls completely painted the color that I want. I think that looks good. So I'm gonna stop there and let this dry. I'm gonna put it in the oven, let it dry and then overnight I'm gonna let it sit under some weights so that the walls go completely flat. I assembled the base of the station as per the instructions then glued the building's interior hardwood flooring to this base and held it flat with steel weights until dry. I cut all of the pre-painted clappboard trim all at the same time to match up to the corresponding walls one section at a time just to understand how things got put together. I simply peeled off the paper backing for the peel and stick clappboard trim and applied it to each of the wall sections until I had all of the clappboards attached. This laser cut clappboard in full wall sections was a real time saver rather than to have individual clappboards to apply which would have taken hours. This really illustrates the great thinking that went into the design and planning of this BTS kit. So now that we got the walls essentially assembled on the structure I went ahead and took some tape and I taped the walls together and I found a location on the shelf diorama where I'm pretty sure I'm gonna put this structure but I've got a wall that's gonna be right here against the back end of this shelf diorama the way it's gonna fit way up high on the layout. And so if you look at this it's obviously when you study the roof's overhang I'm gonna run into a problem with clearance on that back wall and where this is gonna sit. Two options would be take the rear section of the building and cut it off and shorten it or simply eliminate the rear section of the building altogether and just build the station rectangular shape which would allow more room on the rear for vehicles and horses and other details. I'm not that concerned about how the rear of the structure works or how it looks simply because I'll still get my beautiful trim on the sides, on each side and I'll have the front detail and an additional wooden walking platform here in front of the building and the tracks. So I'm gonna like the way this is gonna sit here. I'm pretty sure what I'm gonna do is take a diamond saw and I'm gonna cut off the rear of the wooden floor and simply not even model the rear part of the building. I'll just fill in the back wall of the structure with the existing walls that I've got from the rear part of the building that I won't use and it'll still look acceptable but you're not even gonna see the rear of the structure at all the way it sits on the layout. You're only gonna see the front and the sides and it's again that beautiful ordinate trim that I think really makes the visual effect of this building. So that's the part I'm most concerned about is the front and the sides of the structure. So let's go ahead and just start getting this all the window trim on and let's finish this building up. I fabricated a loading dock to the rear of the station using the parts that were extra from the rear of the portion of the building that we have now cut off and I test fit this rear wall where the building's extension was and has now been filled in and finished with the extra wall parts just to see how it all looked. I also filled in the roof over where the rear portion of the extension was using leftover plywood roofing from that extension. I then glued the main roof together with its tab and slot bracing and sent this aside to dry. Now that I've got the foundation cut to size and we've cut off the rear part of the building and everything has worked out very good on that so far, I've decided to build a Plexiglas base for this structure simply because I want to be able to sink it into the foam so it'll fit where another station used to be in this area the same depth. Plus it'll give me a chance to laminate this Plexiglas and have a really nice passenger loading platform and I'll also have woodwork on the sides here on this Plex so that the steps can come down off of the platforms and have a place to land. Also on the rear, I've taken the scriber and I've scribed the Plexiglas, I've drawn a line right here where I'm gonna cut this Plexiglas running through the saw and that'll leave the earth, a nice foundation and another place to put a set of steps and have the steps land on top of wood planking. So it's gonna be wood planked all the way around the outside and the Plexiglas will simply be laid into the scene after I cut it all out and it will fit absolutely flush with the surrounding scenery. So once I get the base done, which it's always important to get that, then I'll continue working on the outside walls which are just again taped into position so I can get a visual effect of exactly how this building's gonna fit and so far I'm very happy with what I see. I cut pre-stained two by tens with my Northwest short line chopper and glued these to the Plexiglas with wood glue. Using a Dremel router, I cut the foam to a depth that matched the Plexiglas base thickness of one eighth of an inch. I then followed up with a hot foam cutter until the area was carved just right to fit the planked passenger walkways into the foam flush. Then the station with its raised wood base will sit atop of this and it all so far is looking just right. I've got the structure sitting here on its base that we've built and it's again just taped together, the walls are loose fitting and sitting here and the more I look at this, the more I think I'm gonna make another change to it. I've never seen a kit where I change it this much as I'm building it and what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to eliminate the wooden base. I've already taken a putty knife and separated the interior floor from the base. I was able to get that off very easily. So here's the base that we just built. I'm not gonna use this now. Now I'm simply gonna have the floor of the building sitting on top of my plexiglass and I know that's gonna fit very well right on top. And then I'll use the planking that comes with the kit for the walkways for the decking in front and I will be able to put this right over the gap where the plexiglass was showing and the building will sit simply flat on the surface of the plexiglass with the wooden walkway all the way around. I think the building will look good that way. It's totally different than how the kit was designed to be but I think I like the way this is gonna look. So again, change is good and I cannot believe how much I'm changing this as we progress along on this project and I honestly don't know how it's gonna come out. I don't know what I'm gonna change next. Turning my attention to the outside walls of the station since I'm only gonna use about 30% of the detail on this piece of wood, all the parts because we've eliminated so much of the station that I'm not going to use or build. So I've taken the floor here and I've glued the interior walls into it and I've also cut out a few pieces and I've test fit them onto so that I'll know exactly what piece goes where and how much of this I'm actually gonna have to use. I only need three doors so I've cut apart three doors here and I'm ready to glue those together and I think what I'm gonna do is go ahead and glue these parts onto the structure before I assemble the walls together and then when I do get to the point of assembling the walls I'm simply going to use Elmer's wood glue on all four corners of the walls and then use square blocks to square everything up into position and I'm gonna let it all just dry overnight, the bay window, all four walls together and I'll let it sit overnight to dry before I install the glass windows. I cut out all the pre-painted window frames and peeled the peel and stick backing sticking the windows to the clear acetate. I then cut the acetate around the outside edges of each window frame with a hobby knife creating a pile of finished windows ready to be installed. They fit very well into the model as a laser cut wood was precise. I found it helpful to use a file. I like a diamond file. They're very fine and I file around the edges of the acetate just to ensure a perfect fit. I dipped the white corner trim into glue and then using tweezers, applying these pieces to the structure. I also ran white chair rail trim around the entire structure taking my time on this to get this right by measuring twice and only cutting once, working my way all the way around the building. I cut tan masking tape to create window shades which I applied to the inside of each window. I cut all the decorative roof trim pieces that gets applied up underneath the roof overhang. I stuck these 14 trim parts to blue masking tape making it easy to airbrush white paint around the edges ensuring an even quality coat of paint to the parts. I attached the decorative end trim under the roof's edge holding this in place with tweezers while the glue dried. I attached each piece of roof trim one at a time only applying glue to the wall of the structure so that when the roof is removed, the trim stays being only attached to the walls. I painted the underside of the roof with flat white paint giving a smooth finish to the trim and overhang. Now it was time to prepare the shingles. I painted the shingle stock with flat black paint using an airbrush. Using a gray pencil, I colored random shingles on the sheet. This effect will pop when the strips of shingles are applied to the roof. Using a pencil and a ruler, I drew straight lines on the roof giving me a guide to lay the shingle straight and uniform. I applied the shingles one row at a time carefully following the pencil lines. Working my way up the roof, row after row after row, the random color of the shingles started looking pretty nice. I test fit the two chimneys. After being painted brick red, I will glue these pieces into place using Walther's goo. And this is how the BTS train station looks finished. The passengers, all the people, everything just fit just perfect into the spot on the layout as we made many modifications to this kit and it really fits well, just right the way we want it to. So I think this is another winner. This BTS train station went together very easy and came out to be a pretty good looking building.