Four Classic Model Railroad Tips

I love tips from Model Railroading and here are four all time classics that are some of my favorites, and some of this are pretty done easy but they are very effective. The first one, is making frosted grass. You can use that on your passenger course, you can use it in structure and it is as easy as using some scratch brand magic transparent tape. I will show first, what it looks like on the windows that don't have it and the windows that do have it and you can see it really makes a difference. And it is as simple as getting a piece of the tape off, weighing it down over your window, and burnishing it with your finger so that you don't get any air bubbles in there, and once again in about five seconds you've got some frosted glass. And should the tape get some paint on it or get mild is as easy as pilling it off and redoing it. That's a simple tip, model structure as you know sometimes have warped wall sometimes have dings on the walls and will have some joints that maybe don't matchup very well it doesn't make for a very good model, so there are two ways that you can fix this. The first way is with some liquid styrene and this is something that you create your self. Liquid styrene is nothing more than plastic cement that happen to be using Tesla cement here there is nothing magic about using that. And some left over pieces of styrene that will have from brace projects around your layup. And is as easy pouring a little bit of the cement into a jar and then as you get this little pieces of styrene just tossing them into the plastic cement. They will dissolve over a period of a couple of days, and you wide up with some group in essence that is really liquid styrene, and you can make that as thin as you want. The staff that am using here is about the thickness of heavy pancake butter. And then you take your toothpick, and again am using micro brush. I have pulled the brush off after using it for something else so I can reuse it again. And getting a little droplet of this liquid styrene on your toothbrush, and painting it in, to the crack of your building. The place with the joint is not matching up. You can put it up into dings like you see here. The trick on this is to remember that because is liquid cement, it will attack the plastic so you don't wanna go slapping it all over the walls but paint kinda neatly into that crack, and then when you've got nothing let it set overnight and it will only take a day or two because its liquid. What will happen is that it will shrink a little bit. You will have to come back and do another application of it. And once the styrene in there cures and dries, you can send this in your lineup with drink that is perfectly flourish, you can paint it and you will never be able to tell that there was a crack there. Another way of filling this kind of gaps, is by using ordinary baking soda, this is right after shelf in the grocery store what you do is pour a little bit in the crack, slide it inn with your finger and then put a couple of drops of sayonara acquirer that's is meant in the CA in there and the baking soda will absorb CA and harden as a rock. This is not my preferred way of filling gaps, I really like the liquid styrene but where the baking soda really shines is in the backside of corners of the building. If you just put some baking soda into a corner joint, sprinkle it in there really well, get a nice filet of the baking soda, drop some CA in there, and you will see the baking soda totally absorbs that CA, and you wide up with the joint that is hard as a rock and your structure will be extremely strong. So that's two ways of filling joints, one with obvious baking soda, and one with liquid styrene. The last tip from modeling I really enjoy, and that's creating, loads for flat cars. You can use, what's called blister packs or bubble packs. You will find this especially in hardware stores. Here is a bubble pack that is on some magnets, and you can see I use that to make the load on this flat car. There are bubble packs on razor blades. This is actually my favorites right now. This are square gauges that go on framing squares. Cut the blister pack, the bubble pack off that, put it on a free car and look for all the woods like transformers or roof top compressors for air conditioner or what have you. Its easy to do this, by using some facial tissue and getting yourself a good shaped blister pack. Am using one here from a lying level. Get yourself some white glue, put some white glue on the blister pack. Use a paint brush and old paint brush if you want, Really soak that on there, get a nice coating of the white glue on there. And once you got that, you will use your facial tissue and just cover it up. Now, your importance is to, get a tight and nice on there. What you really wanna do in reality, is have a bunch of wrinkles because they will look like, the top wrinkles that you will find in a classic load on a flat car. When the white glue is dry, you get some colored paint. In this case I used gray, paint that over and then cut all round and model it on your flat car. The blue load here came off the Nail Set. It looks like it could be a missile or a drainage ditch, covered or something like that. Once that is done though, what you wanna do and you can see this hopefully on the blue one, is emphasis those little wrinkles on the top, and you do that by dry brushing. The technique of dry brushing involves getting some paint, on your brush and then taking most of it off. You get some white paint on there, it doesn't have to be white it could just be light blue, that's works also. Getting most of that paint off, and then very lightly brushing it over those wrinkles on the tissue paper. And the wrinkles will wide up by picking up some of this white and they will look like sunlight highlights. The last thing to do, is strap your load onto the flat car. I have used some easy line here, I like easy lines because it bends and its prompt to breakage but you can use, thread you can use scale model chains. And that's an easy way to make some interesting looking loads for flat cars. And another advantage is, you can put weights inside this blister packs bubble packs because they are hollow on the backside. So rather than putting the weights for your flat cars underneath, you weigh down those loads. So there is four classic tips for building models on Model Railroad.