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 […]
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 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 […]
Before posting a modeling technique, I look to see if it can meet two marks. First, it must be simple enough that an entry level modeler (middle school student, recent retiree, etc.) can easily employ it. Second, it must create a fair degree of visual impact. Panel line accents meet both criteria. Forcing shadows into the crevices […]
After my last posting, I was contacted by Paul Cooledge who was kind enough to share with me his exceptional utility pole model above. He explained his methods as follows: “I completed this scratch-built 1/87th scale model on March 4th as part of a Railroad-Line Forum challenge and thought that being a fellow utility pole enthusiast […]