The Shelf Layouts Company, Custom Layout Builders and Designers
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January 27, 2012: I stumbled on this little gem that was a perfect fit for Ferrous Processing and Trading. It's Walthers 'Ferrous Shear'. In other words a scrap metal grinder.
January 16, 2012: Here's the finished scene. The reflective strips I put on the back of the crossbucks stand out a little more than I thought they would.
January 15, 2012: Here's the finished structure. Next up, scenery and backdrop in the surrounding area.
January 14, 2011: The small produce business on the NW corner of 14th Avenue has gone through a number of owners in the past six years. I'll go with the one I have the best photos for. So far I just have the structure core completed.
December 31, 2011: Time for an upgrade to an inexpensive Walthers tank car to haul vegetable oil to the customers on the layout. I started with improving mechanical reliability. The plastic trucks were replaced with Kadee metal versions. The extra heft of the Kadees really helps with underweight cars. The standard couplers were replaced with shelf style ones. The car was then tested on the layout for adequate truck swing, lack of car wobble, and free swing of the coupler shaft and knuckles. I put a puff of graphite in the coupler boxes and around the knuckles.
With the car in good shape mechanically, I turned my attention to adding some details. The thick stirrup steps were cut off and replaced with thin cross section Detail Associates pieces. Wire grabs were added as was a new Kadee brake wheel. Finally, I added coupler cut bars and air hoses. I considered adding mesh walkways but decided the visual payoff was nowhere close to the effort involved so skipped that step.
Prior to weathering, I added some while graffiti to the underside. The entire car then received an overspray of a dilute mix of Dullcote, dust, and a few drops of reefer white. Next I made a very dilute wash of thinner, grimy black, and roof brown and applied that over the entire car lingering longer with the airbrush over the white lettering. Rust wheel splatter was added to the ends of the cars with chalk. Dark red rust was applied to the top of the wheel journals with oxide red paint.
Getting effective results with any modeling project involves putting the majority of your efforts into correct coloring and weathering. A light, subtle touch is the order of the day when weathering. Next in line is replacing or downplaying parts with overly thick cross sections with thinner ones. Accuracy of specific details, while a noble goal, has much less visual impact, if any, to the casual viewer (with apologies offered to any true prototypers reading this).
December 18, 2011: Finished up the apron pavement at Antillean Marine and the remaining dock facing. The major elements of the river scene are now done. Now the decision is how much extra time to put into details. I still need more water craft or ships as well as cranes.
Here's the prototype photo I'm working from.
December 10, 2011: Finished detailing the riverbank vegetation and docks between Miami Iron and Metal and FP&T.
December 4, 2011: Finished the grass scenery, palms, fencing, and entrance gates in front of MTB.
December 2, 2011: Added rip rap along banks of the river and also constructed the dock and apron at MTB. Everything is a bit too neat and tidy but I'll deal with that in the upcoming scenery passes. I was pretty happy with the river color match compared to aerial photos. It was a mix of a large bottle of "thicket" green acrylic craft paint and a small bottle of blue.
November 25, 2011: Installed and painted the fascia on the river side of the peninsula. Painted and textured the 'river'. Also, added the office and entrance drive details at FP&T.
November 19, 2011: Time to get serious with the Miami River. The temporary foam base was removed and replaced with high quality, 3/4" birch ply. The bump out is to accommodate a ship if I eventually decide to go that route.
November 12, 2011: Finished up the grade crossing at River Road. Worked in static grass base around FP&T. There is still a lot more to do in this area.
November 12, 2011: Often the need arises to apply static grass to a narrow strip of land. Since the applicator has about as much precision as a shot gun, the surrounding area must be masked off. A very quick and simple way to fashion a mask is to use dampened paper towels.
November 5, 2011: Worked on the gravel private grade crossing entering SSI. Also sceniced the grass scrub strip between the track and River Drive.
October 23, 2011: Factory Direct's Track Mobile is an under rated product. If you change the DCC cv's as described in the directions, it runs like a Swiss watch. Since FP&T uses one to switch the scrap gondolas I picked one up. The only issue is the ultra short wheel base and the fact that it only has four wheels. You need to have very clean track or it will stall. In addition, you do need to power the frogs of the turnouts it will be going across or it will stall on them. There are only three such turnouts to worry about on the river corridor so I installed Tortoise switch machines on them and used the power routing connections. If you look at the photo above, the dark blue wire goes to the frog, the red and green to the track power bus. With the turnout frogs powered and track polished it's pretty cool watching the Track Mobile shuttling back and forth.
October 10, 2011: SSI Maritime Security is the last structure on the river side of the peninsula. I really wanted to include this one because of the interesting anchor logo. Construction is photo wallpaper over a styrene core. The freight door was cut out and recessed. I've gone to a two layer laminate for the structure faces that have windows. The base is a glossy photo. I cut the windows and doors out of the second photo, hit it with acrylic flat spray, and overlayed it over the first image. The glossy photo paper in the window opening gives an interesting illusion of depth. Special thanks to Tom Klimoski for getting the base photos.
September 25, 2011: The last structures on the river peninsula are those within the SSI complex (not rail served) next to FP&T. Both are the traditional stucco covered block so I used my usual photo wallpaper over styrene with stand off details. The Google Streetview photo wasn't usable. A special thanks to Tom Klimoski for making a trip to the site to get me the high resolution photos I ended up using. The crane booms stacked on the roof will make for a nice detail.
September 23, 2011: Miami Iron and Metal is now complete. To finish things off I added the security light poles, the rest of the scrap pile and some additional weeds and brush.
September 22, 2011: Finished the scrap hook for Miami Iron and Metal. This is a Kibri kit. Next on the docket is final detail work inside the compound, primarily more weeds, vegetation and scrap.
September 4, 2011: Here's the completed crane. I still need to track down some hooks but I believe Athearn makes those as a separate detail item. Whenever modeling something with cables or wires you need to think long and hard about how you'll go about it. If you can't get the sag/tension or diameter right it looks horrendous. When in doubt, skip wires and cables entirely (which is why I don't model electrical transmission wires). For the crane I thought I had a decent shot of workable results if I used .015" spring wire for the guy wires and cables running to the top of the crane. I'm happy with the results but it is pretty fragile so we'll see how it holds up over time.
September 3, 2011: Part of the appeal of the Miami River dock scene is the absence of large Mijack container cranes. Instead, the patchwork of small shipping companies relies on older crawler style cranes to do the heavy lifting. Looking down River Drive the viewer sees a forest of derricks. For the first crane I picked up a Kibri Liebherr 883 kit (actually I thought this would be ready to run but that's another story). This particular kit has been a joy to build with tightly fitting parts and little flash. I've been a little surprised how intricate it is. It's set up to be operational but I can see going that far would be problematic on several fronts so I'll keep it as a static model. In the photo above the crawler is done and I'm waiting for the paint on the boom to dry to finish it off.
August 27, 2011: Utility and security light poles. The poles themselves are 8" bamboo skewers picked up at the grocery store. I brushed on Floquil Roof Brown, quickly wiped the paint off and let it dry. Once dry, I applied an India Ink wash. Line transformers and insulators are from Atlas. The security lights are Details West LP-455. Looking at the prototype poles I was a little surprised how crooked they were. I won't be modeling the actual power wires themselves as they tend to be impractical on an operating layout (get in the way/easily damaged).
2011
August 23, 2011: I finally finished up the working industrial gate mechanism at Miami Iron and Metal. As mentioned in the earlier report (August 15), I wanted to capture the range of activities an actual conductor would have to perform on the ground to unlock a gate. The final step was the lock itself. For three dollars I picked up a nicely finished, locking electrical outlet cover at The Home Depot. For a few more dollars I picked up some mini-padlocks at K-Mart. Now when a model operator approaches Miami Iron he must first unlock and upon the outlet cover to access the knobs that open the gates. After that, a few spins on each knob slowly opens each gate panel. When the switching is done the process must be reversed and the gates locked again.
August 20, 2011: The Miami River is heavily populated with a wide variety of tugs and service craft. Although each tug company has it's own paint scheme the version shown above with the black hull, white super structure and red trim is one of the more common ones. The kit is from Kibri.
August 19, 2011: Here's a shot from below the layout showing the mechanism for turning one of the gate panels. By turning a knob on the fascia, the 1/8" steel shaft turns. The worm gear transforms this turning motion 90 degrees. The spring wire that the gate is glued to connects to the loco axle.
August 15, 2011: Recent work has centered around detailing the area around Richard Shipping, with particular emphasis on the fencing (supplied by BLMA). The gated entrance is fully operational.
August 5, 2011: Richard Shipping's back lot is interesting in that the spur to Miami Iron and Metal passes diagonally through it. The rails are embedded in the pavement, something I've always found challenging to model. I have seen some examples where modelers effectively used joint compound (drywall mud) for streets. I was never quite sure I could carry off the mud technique convincingly because of concerns over whether I could get the surface smooth enough. In addition, if I painted it, would the white show through every time I scratched it? At any rate it seemed the only option for the Richard Shipping concrete apron. For color I mixed gray acrylic craft paint into the wet mud. This looked way too dark when the mud was wet but ended up being almost too light when it dried. Better too light than too dark. It took some patience as the mud took quite awhile to dry in my cool basement (this slow cure time ended up being a good thing I think). I needed three applications of the mud. The first layer was rough and looked pretty bad. To my relief a second thin layer really smoothed things out. A third layer filled a few pin holes and cracks. After several days it was just soft enough to cut grooves in the areas by the track for the wheel flanges. Using a locomotive for testing, I gradually deepened the pavement grooves for flange clearance until everything would pass down the track smoothly.
July 29, 2011. Finished the Miami Iron and Metal structure. It's a basic styrene cube with photos adhered to it plus stand off details. The security bars on the windows are photo etched, N scale gates I found in the scrap box. Thanks to Tom Klimoski for taking the base photo.
July 27, 2011: Worked in scenery, parking lot, wall, and sign in the corner of the layout surrounding the Antillean Marine office.
July 24, 2011: When I'm working on a scene I tend to work in passes as opposed to totally finishing one segment before moving on to the next. Start to finish I'll start with the roads, assemble the structures next and set them in place, add scenery and ballast, and finish off with details. This weekend I wrapped up the large, logo emblazoned wall in front of Miami Iron and Metal, added ballast and ground cover on the runaround siding, and added the backside sign to the billboard.
July 12th, 2011: Wrapped up the details for the Antillean Marine truck entrance. Looking at the prototype photo my scene would be enhanced by adding those light poles.
July 11th, 2011: Tying into today's blog, I needed to create a horizon line behind the portion of the layout directly in view as visitors enter the room. Horizon's should be low and of somewhat muted color. The first step was to create a distant tree/bush line. Unless the horizon is many, many miles away it still maintains a fair amount of color. The starting point was a long roll of fine synthetic steel wool cut to length. I scored the back with a utility knife in a wavy line and then ripped the wool in half along the score line. If you cut the line instead of tearing it, the edge is too clean. The next step was to lay the wool on sheets of paper, spray it with Super77, and lightly sprinkle on some Woodland Scenics Blended Turf ground foam. I sealed the ground foam in place by spraying with dilute matte medium. Finally, I planted a few small JTT brand palms in front of the horizon. The JTT palms are somewhat toy like when viewed closely but work well if you get the smaller ones and view them from a distance.
July 1, 2011: Finished the Antillean Marine headquarters building. The overall technique was photo wallpaper over a styrene 'cube' with standoff details added. The above prototype photo was the sole basis for the project and involved a fair amount of work with a photo editor to create the photo wall paper. Each wall is a laminate of three photos stacked on top of each other. First I print off an image using glossy paper. Next, I print the same image on matte paper, cut out the windows and adhere it to the glossy photo so the windows show through. Finally, I take the last photo and cut away everything except the columns and slabs in an effort to provide more definition.
June 26, 2011: This weekend continued work at Antillean Marine. I scratch built the galvanized steel warehouse, built a small guard shack and signs for the entrance, and extended the perimeter wall to the west. Antillean will occupy about seven feet of layout length but is not rail served.
June 21: Completed the structure for Richard Shipping Services. Note how the spur to Miami Iron and Metal cuts diagonally right through the back of the boat yard.
June 19, 2011: Work progresses in the vicinity of the Antillean Marine facility. Note the abandoned track between the main and the street.
June 12, 2011: Modeling the ubiquitous stacks of containers along the river corridor presents a number of problems. First, the distinctive yellow Antillean Marine paint scheme is not available in model form. Second, the cost of individual container models becomes a real issue when you are looking at the significant quantities I will need for this section of the layout. Finally, applying individual weathering to each and every container becomes quite an imposing task. To get around these issues I fell back on the tried and true photo wallpaper technique. A scale sized core was fabricated out of styrene and then photos of the actual containers were photo edited and adhered to the styrene cube.
June 11, 2011: This Bing Maps Birdseye view taken directly over Antillean Marine highlights the appeal of the river corridor.
June 11, 2011: All of the Micro Engineering code 70 track is now in place along the river corridor. The final tally was almost 30 feet of flex track with rail bars and weathering. Not visible in the photo is the addition of extra feeders to the turnout points and frogs to enhance operational reliability of my short wheel base track mobile that will be shuttling back and forth as it switches FP&T.
June 6, 2011: Over the weekend I laid down about half of the painted and weathered Micro Engineering track along the river corridor.
June 2, 2011: From time to time the question comes up as to whether electrical power should be applied to a turnout frog. Most modern "DCC friendly" turnouts have an electrically isolated un-powered frog. In 99% of the situations you will run across the answer is no, you don't need to power the frog. A typical 4 axle locomotive will pick up power from other locations so wiring the frog is a waste of time, time that could be more productively be spent elsewhere. That being said, on the river corridor of my layout I will be using a tiny Factory Direct Trackmobile that has a wheel base of less than 1.5". Since the wheelbase is much, much shorter than most locomotives any un-powered portion of the turnout will cause the Trackmobile to stall. This falls into the remaining 1% of situations you run across. So, for the turnouts around my FP&T scrap yard on the river corridor I will be powering the frogs with power routing handled through the contacts of a switch machine.
For the most part the very finely detailed Micro Engineering turnouts are robust and reliable. However, the design of the point hinge is such that it is common over time for electrical conductivity to the points to be lost. If your locomotive is constantly stuttering as it enters the the turnout you should suspect dead points. You can quickly test whether you are getting power to the points by putting a grain of wheat bulb to the rails. Such stuttering and stalling can be maddening if you don't address it. To provide reliable power to the points of Micro Engineering turnouts I solder a track feeder to the underside of the point rails as close to the hinge as possible and tap the feeders into the power bus as I would elsewhere. Be careful not to get solder on the rail joiner/point hinge and keep some slack in these feeders so the points can swing freely. If you have a Micro Engineering turnout in place already and the points go dead, with a little care you can add feeders after the fact.
May 29, 2011: Time for the track along the river corridor. Presently I have temporary Atlas code 83 in place so I can run trains but now it's time to replace that with more finely detailed Micro Engineering code 70. Fully detailing the rail didn't seem like much work on my tiny East Rail layout. Now that I'm looking at a lot more volume for this area the detail work becomes more of a job. On the straight flex track I start by adding Details West rail bars (pn rb-933) and then a coat of Testors Flat Light Aircraft Gray (pn 1233). After letting the gray dry a few days I'll follow up with a wash of burnt umber artist's oils over the ties. Once the oils are dry I'll mask the ties and airbrush the rail. Hmmm, this is starting to sound like work, something I try to avoid. The rail bars aren't that visible to the naked eye but really stand out in close up photographs. I follow the same technique for the turnouts but do add a bit more bolt detail prior to painting the gray. All the detail and painting is done on my work bench. When the parts are completed and painted I then install them on the layout.
April 30, 2011: Boring but necessary. Masking, striping, and weathering a street this long is a project but at least it's done. For surface areas this large I'll glue it to the foam with adhesive caulk.
North River Drive facing south/southeast. The river is about 100 yards to the right of the tree line behind the gons.
Here's the major paving job of River Drive. Left photo facing south/southeast (same as proto photo above). Right photo facing north/northwest.
This is what visitors see when entering the layout room. Finishing the section they view first will provide more impact.
April 19, 2011: As per my recent blog, I've decided to scenic the area directly in front of visitors as they enter the layout room, specifically the river section of the layout. The first step is to lay in North River Drive. Talk about the mother of all pavement jobs! This particular roadway stretch is a full 17 feet long on the layout and is what I had in mind when I picked up those 10ft long sheets of styrene. Working in lengths this long is cumbersome but gives you fewer seams and is faster. Even so, detailing, painting, striping, weathering and feathering in the edges of something this scale will take me awhile. Although still in the beginning stages, it does make a big impact in terms of orienting the viewer and giving you a sense that you are actually in this part of Miami .
April 7, 2011: Time to paint the pavement. Nothing magical here, just a lot of masking. With the magic of Google Streetview it's a simple matter to just copy the markings. Looking first at the bottom photo, I started by painting all surfaces with Rustoleum Light Gray Primer. Now the tedium starts. The sidewalks were masked and airbrushed with Model Master 'Light Gray'. More masking for the stripes all of which were painted with rattle spray cans. At this point the paint is too brilliant and un-realistic looking. Now lets look at the middle photo. The sidewalk joints and subtle cracks were drawn with a black pencil. I found this yields easier and better results than the old method of scribing the surface. The RR crossing markings are dry transfers from a now out of business supplier. Finally I over sprayed the entire area with an India ink wash using a wand like motion. I turned the nozzle down on the airbrush and completed the job by adding exhaust stains down the middle. The top photo shows the finished section in place.
April 5, 2011: The top photo shows progress as of today on the pavement slab for 22nd Street between 14th and 17th Aves. Bottom view is a prototype photo facing the same direction (east) on 22nd Street with 15th Avenue in the foreground. I picked up a 4ft x 10ft sheet of .060" styrene and cut pieces out of that to fashion the roads. The advantage there is that it's much less expensive and has fewer seams. You can't greedy though and cut too large of a section as that can get cumbersome to work with.
April 2, 2011: Since I was almost done anyway, I decided to finish replacing all of the temporary track on the north wall of my layout with the fully detailed, permanent Micro Engineering code 70. Here's the last stretch of track between 13th and 14th Avenues. At one time this was the Seaboard Air Line's double track main. Notice the old ties representing the abandoned track. Rather than staining wood ties I took pre-stained Micro Engineering ties and lightly sanded the tops. As much as I like Micro Engineering turnouts, on occasion the points have a tendency to go electrically dead. This is because power is fed to the points through point-to-rail contact (which is not reliable) and through the rail joiner hinge (which isn't that reliable either). To beef up reliability I either add a small electrical jumper wire from the point to the adjoining rail (bottom photo) or just run a tiny rail feeder from the heel of the point to the power bus. If you add this jumper make sure the wire has some slack and 'flop' in it so as not to constrain movement of the points.
March 20, 2011: A little vegetation reminds us that this is Florida. Palm in front of Miami Waste Paper is a kit from Hart of the South Models.
March 11, 2011: The rail side of Pan Am Frozen Foods has no signage identifying the industry. In the past I had noticed that their refrigerated delivery trucks did carry the corporate logo. It occurred to me that a logo emblazened truck parked beside the industry would tip the viewer off just as well as a sign on the structure. During my trip to Miami in January I was fortunate to find one of their trucks parked out front and was able to get a good broadside photo. The Boley Topkick reefer is a 'close enough' stand in for the truck. Using a photo editor, I was able to clean up the photo of the actual truck panel and size it so it fit the side of the model exactly. Initially I tried making my own decal but the color never seemed quite right. Since the panel side of the Boley truck is perfectly smooth I used, of all things, paper label stock. For whatever reason the colors turned out perfectly when printed on the smooth paper. After weathering the truck I carefully peeled off the label from the backing and applied it to the truck side. Notice how the rivet lines and dents in the photo reproduce well on the label stock.
February 27, 2011: Here we have the finished locomotive complete with weathering, working ditch lights and Tsunami sound decoder. I'm particularly glad to have the project finished as I've wanted something like this for some time. The beacon just above the porthole is a low fuel indicator. I went a little lighter on the weathering than I have with my previous locomotives as it appears to be more in line with the photos of the number series for the prototype.
February 20, 2011: Now that I have my prized ditch lights installed, attention has turned to detailing and weathering the P2K GP38-2. The model comes with a fair number of detail parts already. In this photo the trucks and underbody were airbrushed grimy black followed by an airbrush dusting of roof brown. This was followed by an application of dark brown chalk and sealed with Dullcote. Units painted light colors (such as gray in this case) respond well to popping out the panel lines with a black wash. Model Master flat black was thinned 10:1 and brush painted on the panel seams (top photo). After the black had dried for about 15 minutes a q-tip lightly dampened in Model Master thinner was used to wipe most, but not all, of the black off (bottom photo). The gray box above the fuel tank is a digital fuel gauge I added. Note that all of the techniques in this photo are extremely simple and there is no reason an entry level modeler or teenager shouldn't try them. If you don't have an airbrush, just use rattle can Floquil spray paint.
February 6, 2011: For quite some time I've wanted a locomotive with a top line sound system and working ditch lights. Primarily out of a fear of the unknown I put the project off for almost a year. I really did want to learn how to do one myself and didn't want to send it out to an installer. Well after two full weekends of teeth grinding it's finally done. The working ditch lights are really cool to say the least and the 16 bit Tsunami sounds fantastic running through the large bass reflux speaker. This is one of those projects where once you get the first one under your belt you could do a second one in a tenth the time.
Parts used as follows:
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Soundtraxx Tsunami decoder (Atlas style light board). part number 678-828048 |
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Railmaster Hobbies 8 ohm Bass Reflex Speaker 18x53x14mm. part number DSM-8 |
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Ditch light bulbs. Miniatronics 1.5v, 15ma, 1.2mm. part number 18-001-10 |
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Used 14 volt bulbs for front and rear headlights |
January 31, 2011: I put a photo backdrop at the end of 17th Avenue. It's hard to get these to look 100% perfect because of the perspective issues and difficulty matching pavement colors. Still it looks better than a plain blue wall.
January 30, 2011: Here I've extended 22nd Street past the front of Miami Waste Paper. There was a fair amount of cutting, fitting, and leveling involved...certainly more hours than you would guess from looking at the photo!
January 26, 2011: The scene on the northwest corner of 17th Avenue is now complete. In the top photo I cropped in some sky. The bottom photo shows the actual scene. All of my structures are removable which is proving to be very handy if they need to be moved for photography or scenery work. When the Miami Waste Paper structure is in place much of this view is blocked.
January 22, 2011: In this view the temporary Atlas c83 track was removed and replaced with Micro Engineering c70. For ballast and soils I use Arizona Rock and Mineral. The soils are a mix of N scale ballast, their industrial dirt product, and their concrete product. I've made a few changes in how I do things in an effort to get a smoother soil and ballast surface. I no longer pour the soil out of the bag or cup but rather sprinkle it on through a strainer (see the brown thing on the left of the photo). I no longer apply the matte medium (Scenic Express pn ex0020) with a dropper but now spray it on both the ballast and soil areas with a fine mister. Also, I seem to have better luck getting ballast off of the ties by rubbing my finger across them as opposed to using a brush to brush the particles away.
January 16, 2011: In a quick afternoon project I whipped up a background building for the location just across the tracks from Miami Waste Paper and against the backdrop (4" wide by 18" long). I knew I'd need this structure prior to my trip so I took a half dozen site photos in anticipation of using them as photo wall paper. The complex surface texture, coloring, and graffiti made photo wall paper the only viable option. The model is as simple as they come, basically a styrene cube with the edited photos glued on with 3M Super77. I added a few stand off details to give more of a 3D appearance and that was it.
January 15, 2011: Finished the Miami Waste Paper structure. Despite the corporate logo it appears the building is now either owned or leased to a food products company (still rail served though). The graffiti laden doors are photographs I took at the site during my trip last week.
January 2, 2011: Over the weekend I finished the core and roof construction and painting. When painting I like to start with a base coat of Rustoleum light gray primer. After that I followed up with an off white from a rattle can for the final color. By having gray as the base and not worrying about getting total coverage with the final color you get a subtle weathered look because just a hint of the underlying gray shows through. The lettering is a self made decal using a photo of the actual logo as a guide. Still remaining to be done are: roof details, doors, awnings, and minor stand off details.