Real Soil or Ground Foam?
When building small scenes that will be photographed close-up, I’ve always used real soil as a base layer. I have coffee grinder for milling any real soil I collect down to dust but this can be a bit messy (think clouds of dust when you open the grinder!), and not always convenient or 100% consistent, […]
We Meet Again Manfrotto 244 Magic Arm
A couple months back I wrote a short piece about the Manfrotto 244 Variable Friction Magic Arm and how it arrived to me looking a bit beat-up. Here’s that article. A few months along and recently I decided I needed another 244 Magic Arm and… to make a long story kind of short, this one […]
NoCry Cut Resistant Gloves
Last January, almost a year ago to this day, I did a real number on my hand while using a single edge razor. Here’s a post I dashed off as a reminder to be very vigilant when working with ANY tools that can cut skin. I find myself now planning on carving lots of DOW […]
Christmas 2015 Desktop Wallpaper
Our good friend Jürg Rüedi in Switzerland has sent us a fun new desktop wallpaper for Christmas. Jürg is a Christmas magician with Photoshop and this year he’s created a very atmospheric Christmas greeting for us. Based on a Z scale diorama we built for Jürg a few years back, we have a pair of […]
Salvaging Scenic Express SuperTrees
A very popular material for making your own model trees are SuperTrees from Scenic Express. SuperTrees are collected from a natural brush-like plant and they do a nice job of simulating real tree trunks and branches. When you purchase SuperTrees, they arrive in tight clumps. You need to go through the clumps and break apart […]
Kato Unitrack Weathering Update
In the last Kato Unitrack article, we masked the rails on our track before painting. We took this extra step to keep the color of the gray roadbed untouched to allow for a better color blend when we added the Kato ballast. By painting the rail sides, we also eliminate any metal from the rail […]
David Rees | BlueRail Trains
I recently read about BlueRail Trains and their new control system for trains, but not the sort of control system I’m used to seeing. Not DCC, but one that can be run right alongside DCC and doesn’t need a lot of hardware in the middle. A system that looks incredibly elegant to me that requires […]
Manfrotto 244 Variable Friction Magic Arm
Previously I’d written about using an inexpensive (e.g., eBay) softbox setup for both my train photos and for my general work lights
Painting Kato Unitrack Rail
In a recent article, I applied Kato ballast to HO, N and Z scale track and I was pretty happy with the results. Here’s the link to that article: https://www.raildig.com/useful-tools/kato-unitrack-ballast-for-ho-n-z-scale. What I was less happy about was the rail itself, specifically my paint coverage of the rail sides, there was still too much underlying shine […]
A Little Halloween Ambiance
Just a little bit of Halloween ambiance for our visitors… almost 3 hours of fun sound effects for October 31st, enjoy! Play while you’re handing out candy or better yet, while your working on you’re layout and remember… if you’re not having fun, you’re probably not doing it right :) Happy Halloween everyone!
