Floating Bench Work


For the layout of East 38th Street’s junction railway I want a cleaner, sleeker design when it comes to the benchwork. Traditional shelf brackets work fine but they’ve always struck me as a little clunky, especially when the layout is in a living area or den. It’s a little hard to move them around or […]

The 80/20 Rule


I can’t remember if it was Al Gore, Mark Cuban, or Leonardo  Da Vinci that “invented” the 80/20 rule.  Either way, it is one of the more universally applicable concepts to roll out of a R&D department in years.  It even applies to our leisure time pursuit.  At least eighty per cent of the visual […]

How Much is a Good Idea Worth?


How much would you pay for an idea that made a dramatic improvement in the appearance of your layout?  Five dollars?  Twenty? Forty?  The latter number, forty, corresponds to the ballpark subscription cost of a hobby magazine.  I hear it all the time, “I stopped subscribing to magazine X” because: it wasn’t inspirational, it didn’t […]