M Graff

Really cool, and deserved. Congrats!!

http://www.break.com/index/couch-airbag-explosion-surprise.html Haha, this made my day!!

This is from the Swedish eBay site (Tradera). I have a hard time understanding why? Wagon Is it maybe so that all things with model trains are worth selling? And when we´re at it, let´s not forget this Gem: Three houses from RS modell They went for a whopping £275!!!!

One of my recent pics: It shows my H0 scale Shay that I photographed at my shelf layout.

Thanks! After those kind words I got the urge to take some more pics .

Hi again, I have had the rebuilt Shay (from earlier in the Blog) sitting on my table for a while now. I decided it was time to finish it . I repainted almost all of it and applied my Custom made decals. I also took the time to adjust the driveshaft as well. It runs really good now, and I hope the looks do it justice too : I made this as well: I think it worked out well.

It´s so expertly made that it doesn´t show at all..... Totally rubbish for that price at least!

An idea for the next challenge: The four seasons, making a layout in a small space (smaller than this one we had) and make it recognizable what season it depicts. And to make it a bit harder, why not make a water-scene mandatory? I love this competition stuff!

Wow! That was real great fun! To see that I got so good results in the 2010 Challenge is really warming in this cold weather. Thanks for all who voted for both me and the other contestants and a big congratulation to the winner!! Waton is a showstopper! My M - K & Eastern RR is being more and more detailed by the week now, It´s really easy to access all places for detailing. I just don´t know why I haven´t made a shelf layout earlier....

I got some nice stuff from my wife this Christmas, a bunch of laser-cut fire escapes and park benches from "Imagine That Laser Art" in Canada. They were not exactly hard to build, but a bit time-consuming A little paint on it, then it will look good. I just had to see how it looks when it´s in place. The Fire escapes is very nicely designed. I have looked at some of the others on the market, but they are too ornamented to be suited in a more basic setting. One package is sufficient for two stories. so in this case it requires 1 ½ packages. It looks pretty decent even at close range. Laser cut plywood is very well suited to do this sort of things. Only the rest of the details to be attached, and some weathering and......... Really great products, and nicely priced too.

Hi all DCC fans! I use the Roco Multimaus digital system, and of course I do appreciate that they have done a very ergonomic handset. But the designer that chose the color ought to have been sent on retraining Sure, the red may well be neat, but not on a controller .... Looks almost a bit "so" .... I did this to mine today: Dismantling it took about 5 minutes, of which three minutes were spent finding a suitable screwdriver ... I cleaned the cover with soap and water, and mixed in a little spirit to accelerate the evaporation. Then I primed it with a black primer: Then came the real fun . I wanted a personal touch, so I thought that I would have stars on the upper part of it, clouds in the middle and fire at the bottom. I used white in my Iwata CM-B airbrush to sketch it up freehand: The back got a little more clouds and a locomotive at the bottom (it IS a Train accessory after all...). Then I added the colors from light to dark and I finished with some white for highlights. This is how it looks before Varnishing: I finished it with a satin-finish spray varnish which I let dry for about five hours before I assembled it: I'm pretty happy with the result, now there is no doubt about whose hand control it is . Source: Pimp my Multimaus!

Hello in the cold . I took the opportunity while I'm still snowed in to address a couple of projects I have been keeping on the shelf. The first is my Shay locomotive. It is a H0 scale, 3 truck 80-ton Shay from Bachmann and their Spectrum series. The locomotive has led to many concerns, repairs and other headaches.... The first thing that happened was that the Tsunami sound decoder that I ordered did not fit .... So I had to build a new tender shell from brass to make it fit: Then the drive gears on the drive line cracked one by one ... :? . Luckily, NWSL in the U.S. makes new gears made of steel instead of the originals that are in plastic! Then the locomotive worked "good", except that it was not possible to back up through a switch, because then the middle boogie would derail guaranteed. I was doing all sorts of adjustments and fine-tuning without much success. Then I thought: :-Aha! I can rebuild it.! I had already mounted the sound decoder in another of my locomotives (that happens ...), and I had just bought a Lenz Gold decoder, the foundation for the project was laid. I've always appreciated the look of two truck Shay´s, and to rebuild it from three truck to two truck ought to work. I dismantled the whole locomotive into pieces: And after some measurements I put the saw firmly to the chassis! I cut off a piece of the chassis behind the rear bolster and cut the tender chassie in the same place. I glued together the two halves with epoxy and reinforced the joint with carbon fiber rods. I then used epoxy with micro balloons in it to reinforce it: Top View. Bottom. When it was finished I cut the original tender shell so that it fit tightly against the cab backside. A little wiring later (I made it all new), that was it: It works much better than before in every way, and it does not look so clumsy as before. Now it fits well as a Port switcher on my layout. It took 5 hours of work, but it was not much else I could have done instead .....

It´s like when I sold my Roundhouse Shay, it was not running and described as "for the technically experienced" etc..... I got something like £ 100 for it At the time, the Bachmann RTR Shay was going for less than that at some Ebay-shops.....

You did notice the "reserve not met" on it?

Fancy a strange 3 different gauges, "proffessionally built" railroad layout? Only $16000!!! And that´s without Locomotives! Link I would pay for someone to just come and pick it up actually.....B) Bugly!

The couple had gone to bed and as they laid there; the husband let off a loud fart! And immediately he shouted: - 1-0! The wife said: -What was that? The husband replied: -It´s a game I invented, bed-football! One fart is one goal, and I´m in the lead. The wife said: -That´s disgusting! But then she thought that this could be a bit fun, so she ripped a good one and a few seconds later a big one as an encore, and shouted: -2-1! I´m in the lead! The husband was really surprised at the response, but thought that he couldn´t be out.farted by a woman. So he tried to get one more out of his system. As he was trying, he pressed a little bit too hard and ripped a major wet fart that had the unmistakenly sound of soiling the sheets! The wife shouted to him: -What in the world was that!! He calmly replied: Half time signal! It´s time to swap sides!

And don´t forget this "looker" 0-4-0 weathered What´s the deal here really?

Just another unfortunate case of: "to call it weathered it has to look like it´s been on the bottom of the ocean for 6 months followed by a 6 month stint in the desert!" As a custom painter myself; I can only say that it is much more difficult to make a convincing subtle/medium weathering that looks "real". I´ve been teaching myself self restraint for the last 20 years, but it´s hard to resist, as it is so much fun to do "rustbuckets" . I have found a nice way to express myself in the "to much" department, and that is to weather wartime shipmodels (WW2).....

Thanks for the appreciative comments, I really enjoyed this project and will now continue with the rest of the backdrop in sections. I would be very tired of it if I did too much at once....

It was time to do something about the background as it had been neglected due to other activities, such as building houses and such . I didn´t like to sit at the layout doing all the details that are inevitable when making a city.... I bought some high quality artist poster board and went to work on it, sitting at my workplace. I put the board on the backdrop to draw all the existing buildings. I then printed out some nice photos of houses along with some books I have for inspiration. I use ordinary artist acrylics and start with blocking in the major parts: (yup the whiskey is mandatory when making backdrops ) As can be seen I have started on the houses nearest the observer. After some time it looks like this: I then cut it out with a scalpel and used a gluestick to apply it on the backdrop: This is how it looks so far: I´m really satisfied with the result. Now it´s only the rest of the 10 foot background to do B) Then to make the clouds as well.

I hope your model railways "SWAT-team" ( I know it´s a bad pun..) have a big supply of Napalm!!

My layout is thought to be situated on the US eastern shore in the vicinity of Maine. It is a shortline with it´s major traffic generated through the Harbour and the Car float operation. I had already made the Car float apron so now I "only" had to make a Car float . Initially I had actually wanted to use the Walthers float, but the scarcity of it and the very high prices on it made me plan a build of my own instead. As I had some plans from Sylvan scale, and a lot of pictures from the Web, it made it easy to make some plans for a Car float that would suit my needs. I like the appearance of the "Station-floats" (the ones with two tracks and a center platform), So that was what I was aiming at. I started with two big Balsa planks (it´s good to be a model airplane builder as well...), I glued them together and sawed them to shape with my band saw. And primed it with some sanding sealer before I sanded down the grain. I glued the rails to it and made the deck from 1,5 mm balsa sheet that I scribed planks in with a pencil. To make the hull plates, I used Aluminum tape and applied at all over the metal areas. I glued some mahogany strips as rubbing strakes on the hull sides. I painted the hull black and stained the deck with India Ink. I weathered the hull very heavily as it is prototypical for the timeframe. I made the railings from brass wire and the platform from wood strips. It really makes the place in the scene I think. To pull the Car float I needed a Tugboat as well. And again was the available kits very expensive... As luck would have it, I already had a Lindbergh diesel tug that I got really cheap on a sale a few years back. It is in 1:90 scale, but that doesn´t really make a difference to me. This is how it looks in original: Here is the BEDT Tug Invincible that I used as an inspiration: I sawed off the bottom of the hull to make it into a waterline model, and I replaced the bridge with a new built from styrene. I made a new chimney from brass to backdate it to steam powered. It is more like the RR tugs of the Eastern shore now. I painted it to represent a Tug that had been around for a while but not too beaten up. That concludes the ship building for this layout B), in the next installment I will concentrate on the city.

Thanks for the compliments! I did the water like this as I felt like to trying something a bit different from the usual methods. I will get to the ships real soon, I might do that in the next entry perhaps.

I was getting ready to start on the Harbour, and I needed to add the various items on the quaysides that was going down into the water before proceeding. I was going to have a small fishing pier and a Carfloat apron, The pier was easy to make: I made the stonewall from balsa, and embossing the mortar lines with a pencil. I primed it with gesso and painted it. Ready! But the Apron was a whole different matter, I needed some hoist/balance structure to hold the wires that keeps the actual bridge in position. After some Web browsing, I found this on eBay: I only had to build the float apron, add some small details to it and paint it : I then turned to the making of the water. To start with, I primed the surface with Acrylic white Gesso. Then I made some ripples and waves with gesso and some gel medium: I was careful not to make the waves to irregular as they have a certain pattern in reality. I started with a basic medium sea blue colour (Vallejo), and made some variety in it by mixing some sea blue into it. I then followed the waves with a fan brush with some light blue in it: The next step was to highlight the top of the waves: To tone it down I added a "glaze" of medium blue mixed with matte medium, I made it translucent enough to just show the different hues underneath. Then I added the final highlights using pure white on the wavetips to simulate foaming: To make it look like water I only had to glosscoat it. I used Future floor polish. It is an acrylic polymer clear that turns out very gloss! I applied it with a wide brush in four heavy layers, and I´m very satisfied with the result: My next installment will handle the various buildings on the layout.