Hi, I'm Jeff Otto and the September What's Neat show starts now. This is What's Neat for September 2016. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month Jeff Otto comes by and shows us how to build a turnout using one of his beautiful turnout jigs. And then later in the show I show you how to build roads and scenery on our layout construction segment this month on What's Neat. And that's the lineup for this September. I want to thank all the viewers. We've reached over a million views recently and we're averaging around 22,000 views per month on all the What's Neat shows. So it's really great to be able to share this hobby with our family and friends around the entire world. So now we go with September 2016 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got Jeff Otto from Oak Hill Model Railroad Track Supply and he came by today to build a turnout and we've set up the high speed camera just to show how absolutely simple this is. How are you doing today Jeff? Hey Ken, good. Great. Now I saw you were using the heat gun a few minutes ago. What are you using the heat gun for Jeff when you're working on this turnout? Well I use the heat gun to melt the solder to attach to the PC tie. A heat gun is just quicker than using a soldering iron but you can use a soldering iron as well but I like the heat gun that's fast. Now that's a good tip. And I just use a little bit of flux and then I also use solder paste that comes in a tube. Now it takes us a couple seconds. So it would appear after you get the first set of rails soldered together with a PC board. You simply lay your ties in place and then lay the turnout right back on top of those ties, correct? That's correct. We have to put the pleobond on the track and let it dry, get tacky for a couple minutes. So what are you doing now Jeff? Well now I'm just activating the pleobond. It's heat activated so this just helps it dry and form a great bond immediately. So when you heat up this plyo bond glue, which is on the rails and the ties right now, and you heat that up with the soldering gun it makes the glue stick. Yep, yeah it bonds it with the wood ties. That's amazing. I actually didn't know that, that's a cool tip. And if you let it dry too much it's hard to get a good seal. So just when it's kind of tacky is when you want to put it back. If you put it on too early you get a lot of squishing, like I've got a little squishing out here of the glue. If I would have waited maybe another minute or two I wouldn't have that squishing. It would appear that the PC ties that you've put on this turnout template are in a very strategic location for the guardrails and the frog. That's an obvious design on your part. That's pretty smart. Am I on the right track there? Yep. This way you have a gap between your frog and the rails. And then you can also gap this rail here. You can gap a rail here, here, here, and then isolate the frog. You don't need to have a PC board tie on both the guardrails. Both ends of the guardrail there's no need for it because there's no force in the guardrail really. Well you're 20 minutes into this project so it's going very quick so far. Yep, now we're going to take it out and put the points and the throw bars on. Okay. Now Jeff I'm looking at a close-up here of your hinge and I notice that the hinge is a small piece of metal, like this one on the table here, and that hinge is soldered into place to the points and the rails going to the points so that you wouldn't lose any conductivity of electricity whatsoever on this turnout when you put down your woodland scenic cement or you're gluing down your ballast. I think that's a great design feature. Now you're putting in one of these hinges on our turnout right now. Yep. And another good thing about this hinge is the fact that there's a hinge, this point can move effortlessly if you want to look over it. Yeah that's a very smart idea. At the other turnout. I never have noticed that until you pointed that out to me. I mean it's effortless. Yes. There's no, there's no stress, there's no, the points will last literally forever. The hardest part about building my turnouts is putting the throw bar on. Throw bars. This one has a hook that just literally goes. It looks like these pre-made throw bars are designed to fit into the hole that you've got drilled on the switch points, is that right? Yep. Yes, that's how I get the points. That's really nice of the, it comes that way with the hole drilled out already for you? Oh yes, it comes like that. Okay nice. And when that goes into place it's going to look exactly like. Then you pull that out, and just like that it's in. Excellent. Just put a little bit of CA right there, there, there and there, and they won't wobble at all and you're all done. So before looking at the clock you're in it at 30 minutes. Is this turnout complete now? It's all ready to go. How about that? I didn't even know we were finished. It took you exactly 30 minutes to do this. And what number of turnout have we built here? That's a number eight with the real-bound Banganese Frog. So here you go. It's simple. We've just built one in four and a half minutes of video, total of 30 minutes build time. Yeah. Now Jeff, it appears that it only took you about 30 minutes to build this turnout. We timed it, we did it over there. Now your jig works flawlessly. I'm very impressed with how quick the whole process went. Tell us what website do we go to and I understand in order to build these all these parts come pre-cut and ready to go. How much are the turnout kits? That's right Ken. Well you can go to www.ohrtracksupply.com and a template kit is $200 and you get everything to make five turnouts. That's great. So all the switches, the ties, everything like you saw in the video, it's all cut ready to go for you to put together just like I just did in 30 minutes. Again listen, thanks again Jeff for coming by and sharing this really cool product with us. I'm impressed with how quick and easy it is to use. Thanks Ken. This is James Wright and you're watching What's Neat with Ken Patterson. I love the show. I hope you guys do too. So check it out with your host Ken Patterson who is just amazing. He does amazing work. I don't know how the guy sleeps. Correction segment of What's Neat. I'm working on a section of the layout that I built about eight years ago and I've never finished. I put a Walthers industrial building in here and a few Bachman silos and a couple siding tracks just to make an interesting area to operate on. Today the subject of this is going to be building roads and I want to show you an illustrate to you and demonstrate exactly how it is that I do these roads. It used to be in the old days I always built roads out of plexiglass because with plexiglass you could scribe it, you could paint it and it was flat and it made for great scenes like the Walthers auto rack loading facility and some of the photos that I did a long time ago. Well today I like to use this pre-mixed concrete patch mix that you can pick up at the Home Depot. It's made by a division of Gap and it comes in a gallon container and mine is about a year old so it's a little crusty but I'm pretty sure I can make it work. A couple of preparations that you need to do first. All the buildings that I've got here on the layout. I've got plywood foundations that I've built for them and I cut the plywood out to the right size, traced the building, got the right size plywood and then I sprayed the plywood with a little bit of primer just to seal it so that it won't be affected by moisture and I wouldn't have to worry about it warping or changing its shape in any way because as we work with this concrete cement patch mix which really isn't crusty cement it's not brittle it's something that stays soft even after five years I've torn up sections of my layout where I've had this cement and I wanted to change things and it literally peeled right up and curved right up and it would remain flexible five years later so this is something you don't have to worry about it ever getting brittle on your layout or cracking it remains flexible so far for the lifetime that I've been using it. Now with regards to the plywood foundations we're going to butt the cement right up to the base of the plywood. I've got the plywood screwed in the place so later on I can cut around it and remove it and then glue the buildings to the plywood which will allow me to have it be removable to work on the models and then put them back into place into the layout. Now we're going to lay the cement directly on top of foam. I took one by four material actually I think yeah one by fours and I took a strip of one by four and I ran it to the bandsaw and what I did was I cut up eighth inch by eighth inch lumber that I've then taken pins and I've pressed it here into the layout where the road's going to go and we're going to use that as a form which will keep the cement in place so that then we could build ballast shoulders or black cinder shoulders on either side of the road. Now the way I'm going to do this the key here is to keep the cement wet so I've got a spray bottle here that's going to help smooth the cement and I've got multiple putty knives here I've got a five inch a four inch and a two inch and I'm probably going to use the four inch for most of the process so let me show you now how this turns out and how the process goes. Now I've scooped the putty and I've got it on my knife here and I'm going to just lay it right in between the forms that I've got here let me show you how this looks. Now this material is thick because it's kind of old and that's the point of using the water is to keep it moist keep it workable so that's what I'm going to do here you literally just spread it between the forms consistency of peanut butter very easy material to work with now there's no magic to this this is going to take some time I'm going to work my way across the roads I've also another point I want to show you here is I've got the railroad crossing as you can see here there's a railroad crossing here and I have filled it in with railroad ties and sanded it flush with tops of the rails and then I'll simply put the cement right up to the very edge of where these ties are same way over here in the parking lot I've built a railroad tie road where it's going to cross and then into the parking lot and I don't have forms into the parking lot right at the edges here at the curves because I can actually cut this and work this with the knife and I'm also going to run the cement right over the top of this narrow gauge trackage which is a spar that dead ends and I'm not going to have any planking on that it's simply going to be a cement and then I'll carve in the flange way for the train to run on that moving right along with the four inch trowel I'm evenly spreading the cement between the forms and I'm starting right here at the railroad crossing I'm pulling the putty knife really smooth everything's wet and I'm just going to drag it now I cut off the tops of all the little pins that are holding the wooden forms in place so that it wouldn't be skipping over those but see how I'm just dragging this smooth and I want to do this on most of it now as this dries over a period of two days it's going to start to crack as it dries and we're going to go back over with a second coat it's to be expected it's a two coat process when I do this this way as you can see everything's relatively smooth that's exactly how I'd like it to be so I'm just going to continue working this all the way around I've still got a large parking lot and you know the cross intersection here to work on so I'm going to keep working on this now the same fashion and let's see how this progresses further on my knife right up to the railroad crossing here pull it across the top of the tracks which I can easily clean out the flange ways and everything this material is going to take many days to dry so with regards to workability you've got hours to work with this now the only thing I need to do is to complete the parking lot back here so that's what I'm going to do here is work on this parking lot this material is very forgiving and again you can sand out any trial marks that you might get not one but I'm just finishing up the area here in the parking lot with a final wet smooth trawling and I've done all the roads now just coming down at the end of the parking lot here which will run off to a ravine so essentially this is what I've got this is what it looks like now anything that you see that looks totally imperfect I'll sand out I'll take the forms off and then after we let this dry for just a couple of days we're going to come back and do the second coat and that's what we're going to fill in some of the cracks as it dries it kind of cracks just a little bit and then it'll be finished so one more coat a couple days later and these roads will be finished and we'll show you how to I'll show you how to color them to make them look like black top I very carefully used a knife to make sure that the road separated from the wooden forms and then I pulled up the wooden forms that were being held down by the two inch long needles then I took sandpaper and went over the roads sanding off the sharp edges and some of the uneven spots but I gotta tell you there weren't that many uneven spots this went pretty quick okay now it's been 48 hours of dry time and of course 24 hours ago I sanded things and cut off the edges you saw me do so now the roads need to be patched with the second coat of cement mix material and this is a container that it that it always came in and I read the back of the container and it said in fact it was made by Dap well I just this is empty now so I bought a new container of the material just last night and in fact it's got Dap's name on it and a whole new package label and everything so it's really easy to identify you get this at the Home Depot it's about $20 for the whole gallon and what what I'm gonna do now and I want to show you the cracks that we've got to patch it's not so bad actually you can see some of the smaller cracks right here and then as we move over towards this section where the roads converge I've got a lot of cracks to fill here all the way down and it's simply because as the material dried it shrank and you develop these cracks so by putting a second coating on it'll finish the road and prepare it for its final coloring phase and building shoulder so to apply the coat all I want to do is use a small knife and here I've got one of these Ross painters knives and these are perfect I find so many uses for these but these are gonna be perfect they're simply taking the cement fresh out of the new container here and all I'm going to simply do is as if I'm doing dry wall work I'm gonna fill in those cracks with the painters knife and a little closer here to see what I'm doing I'm scraping the material out of the bucket onto my knife not very much here and I'm going to fix these cracks right here and all I simply want to do is if I'm doing drywall work just smooth it on and what I don't have here right now they need to get as a spray bottle full of water and then I'll spray a little water on this and further feather it and smooth it to blend it and this makes really nice patch work and it'll complete all these small cracks that are in the road so let me do this and then we'll get on to the shoulders my layout is a modular layout so the way I handle the cement roads at a joint here you can see I've got a spot where two modules go together and I've made the cement all the way across a smooth transition here okay so when it's finished with scenery everything's gonna line up and match but I still have to cut the cement because it's like a latex material it always stays sort of flexible I'm able to take this saw and I'll be able to just put it right where the line of the module separation will be it's a very easy material to cut it doesn't dull in my saw blade so just like that the two modules are separated and I'll vacuum this out but I still have a very smooth transition so when we drive our radio controlled vehicles across the road it'll be a very smooth transition so that's how I handle the separation points of the roads everything's been patched now and it's going to dry for another 24 hours before it's time to color it paint lines on it and of course build a shoulder on the side of each other side of the road so at this point it's just time to wait the one thing about making the roads out of cement is it's a very slow process and right now I'm seven days into this project and I've made new roads here along the edge of the layout that run along the main line I've completed the parking lot over here for the industrial building and all the railroad crossings are all smooth everything's been sanded down now is with a piece of sandpaper and I've done each one of these sections of road one section at a time taking about 48 hours to glue every five feet or so as I've decided to add on because I find it's a lot easier to build the road first and then after the road sets up then build the adjacent parking lots and other roads that connect it gives a really nice edge and it looks good but now it's time for us to weather the road now that everything's been dried and sanded I want to weather it with India Inc and I've got a jar of India Inc here that I use for model building and all advanced modelers your guys have been modeling for years have read in the model press about India Inc and how we like the weather our wood structures with it well I like to put two coats of India Inc on my roads and then the parking lots and some of the adjacent areas I like to only put on one coat and that gives a nice variation it looks like black top on the road and a lighter bleached out parking lot as you can see in this one area where I modeled right where the train wreck saloon is and that's an American model builder structure in this scene which I've used for years for many many photographs but let me not leave you hanging with exactly what is India Inc I've got about a half an inch here in my jar and a jar like this will last you a good seven eight ten years and that's about how long this one is lasted so this gives me the opportunity to show you exactly what is India Inc and how to mix it India Inc is simply well oil or well ink for using with a mechanical ink pens black India Inc I've got a bottle of it right here I've shaken it up and this bottle hasn't got a dropper in it really like using an eyedropper I've got another bottle here this got an eyedropper in it so I'm gonna use this and what I like to do is put two full eyedroppers of this material in my jar one two full and this stuff's pretty intense this is pretty this goes a long way now we're gonna thin it I just picked up a bottle of alcohol here from our local Walgreens and it doesn't matter if you get the 91% or the 73% of all works the same I'm gonna dump this alcohol into my mason jar here and I'm gonna fill it all the way I'm gonna fill it so as far as this bottle ago which should be about 75% to the top and that's all there is to it you shake it up and this is another good mixture of India Inc two eyedroppers goes a long way you can make it stronger but I'd rather have a weaker mix and then apply it to a structure in coats so that I can build it up I don't want it to be too dark all at once so now that I've got this mixed I'm gonna take this regular soft paint brush and we're going to start applying it to the roads and again I'm gonna put one smooth even coat on you're gonna get streaks but it's all gonna it's all just gonna just blend together as it dries and it's pretty foolproof it's really easy you don't you're not gonna make any mistakes doing this put on this front row here quickly and then I'll do the whole layout but this will take the black top and give it really beautiful dark color smells good and it looks good just apply it evenly and after it dries we'll apply a second coat to the roads and then we'll get the mask everything with tape and put our road lines on so I'm gonna do this now in the entire layout just what you see me doing here on all 12 feet of roads that I've built after the India Inc dried I started on the scenery by cutting fake fur to fill the unkept grass areas along the road I glued the fake fur down with foam pro adhesive I then trimmed the fake fur into random patches to look like wild grass I painted the grass with cans of spray paint varying in shades of green after applying backyard dirt to the scene I evened the dirt out with a hairbrush I then applied woodland scenics gray ballast along the track areas I also use the same ballast to create the shoulder along both sides of all the cement roads I used a block of wood to plow the ballast off of the top of the road along pavement creating perfectly level shoulders about four feet wide I used a flat fan brush to clean the excess ballast from atop the pavement moving the ballast to the sides and the shoulders of the road I then added ground foam in varying shades of green to the grassy areas further blending the scenery and the dirt areas along the layout and the roads and now that we've got all of our shoulders completely smooth and made all of the ground foam of the dirt all of the various things put into place here now I'm going to take two bottles of woodland scenic scenic cement I'm going to spray the entire area and keep everything real fine misted so that the shoulders stay smooth and flat and then it'll all harden and by say tomorrow in about six or eight hours by tomorrow morning it'll be then hard and we can go ahead and start painting our lines so let me get started doing that I need to spray the entire area with this woodland scenic scenic cement and protect the areas that don't need the glue I've got a very fine mist one more thing I want to point out is as you see I'm spraying the road and what'll happen is the cement that is semi porous will be sealed by the woodland scenic scenic cement so that if you come along and put a soda cup or a can or a beer can or something on the layout right on the road and it sweats you won't get that ring it won't soak up the water it'll be sealed from the woodland scenic scenic cement so it's kind of a benefit to spraying everything overall so about 48 hours later and the shoulders of the road are rock hard all of the scenery and dirt and grass work in the area is all hard and dry so now it really is time to start putting the final coats of paint and detail on the cement roads and right now I've got a piece of paper in my hand with some holes cut out in it some squares just random cut out squares and I've got an airbrush full of some black floccal paint and it's thin very thin and I'm using about 15 pounds of air in the I want airbrush and what I'm going to do is take this piece of paper and simply hold it over the area and gently very lightly spray these various squares on parts of the road to create the effect of patchwork cement stonework and patchwork asphalt work repair work things like that so that when we put the lines on the road this will add just a little more accentuated detail to the overall finished scene now to paint the road markings and the lines on the roads I'm using fine line 3m masking tape and in this case I'm using about six millimeter tape and there's no magic to this I simply run it along in this case I'm doing the outside white line on the road and I'm going to airbrush it with 15 pounds of air and the paint is thinned here in a glass jar underneath my Iowa to airbrush now the two fine line pieces of tape form the center where I want the airbrush to spray the road and then I've got some larger blue tape on the outside and because I'm using such low air pressure I don't have to worry about over spray on the road and as soon as you get this tape down you want to go ahead and start painting right away because it doesn't it doesn't stay stuck very long between the cement and the small little pieces of ballast that we've got it doesn't stay stuck very well so I'm taking my airbrush now and I'm simply going to airbrush very lightly slowly and because I'm using low air pressure I don't have to worry about the air or the paint bleeding underneath the tape or getting sprayed under the tape take your time on this and do this slow and really the whole process is very slow between the center lines the outside lines the railroad crossing markings and all the other appropriate road painting that I've got to do keeping the lanes about 11 feet wide is what I'm doing the stripes are about four inches wide now let's say that you don't have an airbrush and you want to get your roads made right away when this is all said and done and after all the masking is complete I'm gonna end up with roads that look just like these roads here made out of the same cement material now there's other ways to paint the white lines on the roads if you don't have an airbrush and that is you can use a straight edge and one of these artistic artist pastel pencils these things work really good although they're kind of faint and another device that works really well is a Sharpie marker these things paint in white and it's got kind of a large tip on it so you still unless you're doing O scale you still got a mask and use one of these but if you don't have an airbrush this will make great white lines on your roads so at this point I've got a lot of work ahead of me to complete the process of working on this and that's what I'm going to do now I'm just gonna slowly over the next few hours work on all 17 feet of roads and get these all painted with lines and we'll see how they turn out upon pulling up the tape a realistic looking four-inch white stripe is revealed along the sides of the new roads I continued masking out the side stripes along the new roads masking about 30 feet in total to create the four-inch solid outside lines the scene looking better and better each time the tape is pulled up I also masked the pattern of the center stripes careful keeping these evenly spaced I then painted these broken lines with an airbrush and the white paint working my way through the scene this process took about six hours to complete it was wonderful to see the progress each time a new section of masking tape was pulled up and the last thing that I like to do on finishing off the roads I take a Sharpie and I use a couple different size Sharpie magic markers here and I also like to use paint in a brush for this because the Sharpies tend to fade out after a couple of years but what I like to do is I draw the tar lines on the road where you see all the cracks where the road departments come by and and done patchwork and you see that on so many roads and there's no random there's this completely random pattern so there's no real instructions or method on to doing this it's just you do it and it just kind of looks really great so that's it for these roads these roads are finished pretty much I've got to do all the signage guardrails trees bushes and of course I could spend another 30 days working and finishing off the scene but I'm very satisfied with the results of these roads they're smooth so they're perfect for running RC car vehicles and I really like the way this material allows me to transition between the gradients the different topography of the track work something you just can't do with plexiglass so this cement material it's flexible if I wanted to tear it up it would just peel up like linoleum but I'm not going to do it now I'm very satisfied with the way these roads are coming out so that's this segment of what's neat on making roads it's a great method it's something I suggest you try it's pretty foolproof and your results are going to be great for making roads for your layout