Grant & Sattler Expeditions 12' Cars | On30 Thunder Mesa Model Railroad

Howdy folks, Dave here for Thunder Mesa Trains. Welcome back to the studio. You know, I woke up this morning and I thought to myself, I just want to do something fun today. One of the things I really love about modeling in ON30 is that it kind of gives you creative license to do things you might not ordinarily do in other scales and gauges. It's not quite three foot gauge, it's not quite two foot gauge, it's kind of right there in the middle. So it almost encourages you to be more imaginative, to be more creative, to do things that are a little fantastical sometimes and maybe a little bit out there. You know what I mean, things that you wouldn't necessarily do on a strictly prototype serious model railroad. And with that in mind, I want you to check this out. This is a beautiful 3D printed T-Rex skull, roughly O scale. It was given to me by a friend. You know, it's been sitting on my workbench here for months while I try to figure out what to do with it. You know, I already have one T-Rex skeleton on the Thunder Mesa layout embedded into the rock over in Dinosaur Gap. So I thought it might be fun to have this skull on a flat car, like it's been excavated by paleontologists and is now ready to be shipped out. And that led to the idea of having a pair of cars representing an entire paleontological expedition. Now I want the cars to be small, really not that much bigger than the skull itself. I think that'll really help lend to the humor and help to tell the story. So all cars that are about a scale 12 feet long. So I started looking around here through my scrap boxes and drawers and, you know, boxes of old parts. And what I found is this lovely Bachmann ON30 passenger car truck. These trucks were about a scale eight feet long by about four and a half feet wide. And I think I'll make an ideal starting point for a little 12 foot flat car. And then with all of the proper measurements in hand, I got on the computer once again and opened up my vector art program, Affinity Designer 2, which is very much like Adobe Illustrator, and went about designing all the parts I would need for a 12 foot flat car to fit on top of this truck. So I've got some 16th of an inch thick MDF that I cut for the frames. I cut enough pieces for two complete flat cars. And then I've got some 1 8th of an inch thick basswood, then some decking for the top. This is some 1 32nd of an inch thick basswood. And then I've got some laser board parts for the steps and some other details. I'm going to start construction by putting these MDF under frames together. Make sure everything lines up nice and square. And that makes that about 1 8th of an inch thick. And these little wells are here to clear the wheels on the truck. And I've got these little U-shaped pieces of MDF. These are to define the coupler boxes. And as usual for construction, I'm using some Titebond wood glue, yellow PVA. And now that should fit right down on top of the truck. I'm going to need to trim off maybe about a 16th of an inch of this little mounting stem that comes up on these trucks, but that's no big deal. The great thing about these trucks and why I wanted to use them is because they're mostly metal. So they're, you know, they've got some nice weight and they track really nicely. And they have the weight down there in the bottom of the car at the wheels where you want it. And now I want to distress and stain all of these basswood pieces. Just using a fine tooth razor saw to enhance the wood grain a little bit. And for stain, I'm using my Rejuvenate wood furniture repair markers in light gray and medium gray. Now I can glue the side beams on and these need to be dead flush with the top of the frame. And then the end silts. And these have a little notch in the beam, which lines up with the coupler pocket. And these coupler pockets are designed to accept KD number five couplers, HO scale with draft boxes. Now I can add the stirrup steps. And these are cut from some 25 one thousandth of an inch thick laser board. I'm lining these up with that end beam and then coming in about a sixteenth of an inch from there. Well, so far this build has been going pretty fast, but now things are going to slow down quite a bit because I need to add a whole bunch of nut bolt washer castings to hold on these stirrup steps and, you know, to hold the end beams on and the center beam and all that stuff. And I'm using some Tichy Trains 8016 standard NBWs. It says HO scale, but, you know, big bolts in HO scale are just small bolts in O scale. So I've got a number 70 bit in my pin vise. I'll just start on this side right here. Start drilling holes. Cut one of the NBWs off of the sprue into my finger, grab it with the tweezers, and stick it down into this little spot of cyanoacrylate I have here in my glue dish. Push it down in the hole. On the end sills, once I get all of the small nut bolt washer castings installed, I've got a couple of little holes left over, and those are for some great big nut bolt washer castings. Even though I'm not modeling truss rods on these cars, I do want to have them indicated with large nuts and washers on each end. Yeah, it takes a minute to do, but boy does it add a lot to a project like this. Now with that job done, I'm ready to get some paint on both of these, but I want to build in a little bit of variety. So one of them I'm going to do with the standard red oxide, and the other one I'm going to use my dark brown camo. Now while I wait for that paint to dry, I want to do a little work on this dinosaur skull. This is a great looking 3D print, but the problem is it's a little bit too perfect. It doesn't quite look like a fossil, it looks like bone. And to make it look like a fossil, I want to have it embedded in some rock that hasn't been cleaned away yet. And to that end, I'm going to mix up a small amount of Sculptamold and force it up inside of here. Kind of fill the cavities with it. Now I'll just keep smoothing this with a paintbrush and a wet finger. I want it to look like it's kind of emerging out of this pillow of rock. Yes, this gets much easier to work with after it's had a chance to set up a little bit. I think I've about got it where I want it. Well, I let this dry overnight, but it could still use a little more time. It's still a little cool to the touch. So in the meantime, I'm going to finish building the cars. And the very next thing I can do is glue these decks on. A nice even coat of yellow glue on the back. And that should fit right on top of there. Now I want to add some numbers to the car, right about here, just to the left of that stirrup strap, using some Woodland Scenics dry transfers. And I like to cut them out like this. I find that this makes it a little bit easier. I'm not messing around with the whole big sheet of dry transfers while you're trying to do this. Take a piece of scotch tape and lift that piece you just cut out of there like that. And I want to trim that tape down. I've just got a little tab sticking out to help me to position that and hold it in place. Take my time lining it up pretty straight. Now I'll use a soft lead pencil and go over the letters, or the numbers in this case, and transfer them onto the model. This is always a little bit stressful. Not quite as stressful as water slide decals, but it's in the same ballpark. Pull that backing off. That's about the best that I can do. Take the kind of tissue paper backing sheet that they provide and go over the letters again, or the numbers in this case. Make sure they are well adhered. If it's a wood model like this, this pushes them back into the grain. There we go. Not too shabby. Now I've got these tiny little tie downs that I want to put on the car, two on each side. These are cut from some 25 one thousandths of an inch thick laser board, painted dark brown to look like iron, and I'm going to glue these on just about a scale two feet from the end of the car. I'll do two on each side. Then, you guessed it, more nut bolt washer castings. Same small ones I used before. Now I think at last I'm ready to attach the truck. For that, I'm going to use some of this Gorilla clear grip contact adhesive. Let's put a little bit on here. Don't want to spend too long using this stuff. Get a little high. I want to put some on the truck as well. Contact adhesive always works better if you apply it to both surfaces. Now the instructions say to let that set up for about two minutes, so that's just what we're going to do. Now two minutes later, line this and press those parts together firmly. That looks pretty good. Now I'm adding the draft gear boxes and the KD number five couplers, and I'll show you the most expedient way I've found to do that. First thing I want to do is trim the little extra ears off of the draft gear boxes. And off of the lid as well. Then once again, I'm going to take some of this contact adhesive, smear it here on the bottom of the car, and put some on the bottom of the box as well. We'll wait the requisite two minutes and then drop this in here, making sure that the holes in the draft gear box line up with the hole that I've got pre-cut into the frame. Grab one of the centering springs out of here. These things are real delicate, so you got to be careful you don't bend them. Seat that down in there, grab one of these number five couplers, and I want to trim off the magnetic trip pin, because I'm not going to be using that, and these cars wouldn't have air hoses anyway. Take the lid, put that over the little peg there, and line that up with the hole. Now I've got some screws from my large collection of tiny screws that just happened to fit here. Drop one of those in there and screw that down until it stops. Don't want to over tighten it. Make sure that centering spring is working. And then I always want to test the the coupler height with a piece of rolling stock that I know is already correct. That's pretty good. KD also sells a coupler height adjustment tool which you can use. Now except for the final weathering, that is one flat car done. Right now I want to paint a dinosaur skull, and I'm going to start by painting this entire thing with some burnt umber. In my research I discovered that the science of paleontology goes back to the late 1700s, but the term dinosaur wasn't coined until I think it was 1843. So, you know, there have been dinosaur hunters around for for quite a while. At the time of on the Thunder Mesa layout. And once that brown is dry, I'm going to go over the whole thing again with a dark wash, heavily diluted brown and black. That's really going to bring the details out later. Now I can do the rest with my basic scenery colors. Got some raw sienna and some unbleached titanium. I want this rock to look like it came right off the layout, so I'm using the same basic colors to paint it. First I'm just going to kind of lightly hit the whole thing with the raw sienna, not trying to fill in the nooks and crannies where that dark brown is. I want that to show through as, you know, shadows and darker tones. And then I want to go back over it again with about a 50-50 mixture of raw sienna and the unbleached titanium. And it's layering the colors like this that makes this particular technique so effective. Using a very, very light touch with the brush. And each time I go back over it, I'm mixing in a little bit more of that unbleached titanium. So we're going from dark to light, from the darkest tone to the brightest highlights. And for the final pass, I'm going to use pure unbleached titanium and just dry brush it over where the bone is. Then after a little more final touch-up with that unbleached titanium, we've got ourselves a very unique flat car load. And I'm going to glue it down to the deck of the flat car with a couple of spots of Eileen's tacky glue. Let's get that weight right in the middle. Now I've got to tie it down. Got some size 10 crochet thread. Put that through those little tie downs I added earlier. This way and across his nose. This one back over the top again. This one over here and around the back. And then one more time back around the way we came. And I'm going to cheat, put a little CA on the back of that before I tie it off. Well, now that I've got all of these ropes where I want them, I'm painting them with some diluted white glue so that when that dries, they'll be stiff and they'll stay right where I put them. And I also want to stain all the ropes with my watercolors so they don't look so clean and pristine. Now I'm ready to finish the second car, but this one's not going to be a flat car. It's going to be more like a private work caboose. And I decided that I want to have a light inside of this car, which would be powered from the track. So before I install the truck underneath the frame, I had to do a little bit of alchemy on it. If you get one of these Bachmann coaches and take it apart, you'll notice that there's a wire coming from each one of the trucks on opposite sides. And that's to provide power for the internal lighting that a lot of these coaches have. So I wanted to draw power from both sides to light a light inside of my little work car here. So I had to do a little jury rigging. I put a little brush pickup, a little copper brush pickup on this side, getting power from this wheel to match the power that's coming from these wheels on this side. And this all has to be insulated. I insulated all of this with some heat shrink tubing, including down where the screw goes through, so that it doesn't cause a short circuit when this is put on the track. So now I've got independent power coming from this side and from this side, plus and minus if you will. And I've tested it out and it will light a three millimeter LED without shorting out the railroad. So I think we're safe to proceed. So now I need to drill a hole through the MDF frame and up through the deck to run those wires through. Now I can install the truck and the couplers just like before. This time I want to run these wires up through this new hole. Because I want this car to have some cool graphics on the side of it, I'm going to use a technique that I've used before with some success on both structures and rolling stock. And that's to make the walls out of printed paper with the CG wood textures. I'm a graphic artist by training and I create these printed paper sides using a couple of different programs. One of them is Affinity Designer and the other one is Affinity Photo 2. And if you don't know what those are, just think Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. They behave in roughly the same way without having to deal with Adobe Corporation. Very importantly, I make sure everything is scaled to print full size at about 300 dpi for a high quality print. I downloaded these CG wood textures from various different websites. They're easy to find. Just do a quick google search for CG wood textures or CG textures and you'll find them. I select a likely looking portion of the CG textures and then import those into Affinity Photo 2 on a separate layer from the graphics. Then the CG wood textures are properly sized and shaped for the model in a layer underneath the graphics. And then I copy and paste and rotate as needed to fill up all the wall space that I have. Then I use the levels and color balance and vibrance tools to adjust the look of the CG wood texture graphic. I want to get it to a kind of a lighter off-white, almost an antique white shade here. And then when I'm happy with the color, I can go back and select different areas with the lasso tool and desaturate those a little bit more to represent weathering down towards the bottom of the car. Then I'll do some similar adjustments on the graphics layer to make sure that everything matches up nicely in the color and weathering departments. And then when I'm happy with the way everything looks, I print it all out on some high quality matte photo paper, being sure that I'm printing it out at full size with the highest quality photo settings. And this is the final result, ready to be cut out and applied to the model. But before I cut these out, I actually want the pieces to be a lot thicker than this. So I'm going to laminate the printout to the back of some Crescent 300 illustration board, which is about a sixteenth of an inch thick. To do that, I'll coat the back of the printout with some of this 3M Super 77 multi-purpose adhesive. Now you can see that glue on there. Always try to get a nice even coat. I'll lay that down on the illustration board. Use my brayer, make sure I have it well adhered. And then with a new sharp blade in my hobby knife, I can go ahead and start cutting the pieces out. At this point, some of you might be wondering why I don't just print the pieces out and then, you know, then cut them out with the laser. Well, I have tried that. I did experiment with that. The problem is registration. It is really, really difficult to get the printed image to line up for the laser properly. And, you know, I'm sure there are laser cutters out there that can do it. But the setup that I have right now at this time, it's better to do it by hand. These ends are a little tricky because I need to basically cut these curves freehand. Now with these all cut out, I can show you the reason why I put the printout on the back of the illustration board. And that's because I want to use the good side, the working side, to represent raw wood, at least in the front kind of gondola part of the car. So I want to come in and indicate some boards here on this side, six-inch boards. And I'll use a fine-tooth razor saw to scribe some wood grain into those. Come back with my hobby knife and actually scribe the boards themselves. Then I'll mix up some cobalt blue and some burnt sienna, mix those together to make a nice warm gray. With watercolors, you don't mix black with white to make gray. You mix blue and burnt sienna. Now I can use that to make these look like wood. That's really all there is to that. Well, almost all. I also want to use the same mixture to paint the edges here where this is going to show. Now with that job done, I'm actually going to start putting this together. It's going to fit. And then this short piece goes up here in front, finish off this gondola section. Now I'm adding some one-eighth inch square stock down here around the bottom of the structure. This will do two things. One, it makes it stronger. And the other, it will prevent light from creeping out under the bottom. I've also cut myself another arched piece from the illustration board to put right here in the middle to help support the roof. And I'm ready to put that on. And I've got some laser cut parts for the doors and the windows and the trim. Now I'll get some paint on all these pieces and I think we'll go for a flat light tan. Since I'm planning to have a light in here, I want the the car body to remain removable. So I'm marking the interior edges at the bottom so that then I can glue on some more of these one-eighth inch square pieces. So then the car body can key in and lock in right on top of those. This is a three millimeter yellow LED already pre-wired with a 510 ohm resistor on there. I think that'll work. Now I've got some clear acrylic glazing and I want to fog that with one of these Avery address labels. And I'll glue one of the window frames on here with some of this zap canopy glue. Let that set up for a minute and then I can just cut it out. Add a little glue around the interior of the window opening. Drop this right in there. And then the window frame right over the top of that. And I'll add a small piece of blotter paper as a window shade on the inside. Now I just need to build one more on the other side of the car. And now pretty much the same thing with the door. Drop that into the opening. I have a doorknob made from a HO scale track nail. And then this frame on top of that. I've added a ceiling to the car which is just a couple of pieces of chipboard and those are to help prevent light leaks from under the edges of the roof, which is what I'm going to build next. I'm making the roof out of a piece of bristol board because it's thin and flexible and also fairly strong. I'm going to wet one side so I can curve it and simply hold it around this glue bottle. And I'll use my hairdryer and dry it in that shape. So for roofing I'm going to use some of this athletic tape because it has a very close grain and at scale I think it'll look a lot like canvas. I'm going to cut it into some three foot wide strips. And of course this stuff is sticky on one side. I'll just lay my roof down on top of it leaving about a sixteenth of an inch hanging over the edges all the way around. Overlap that by six scale inches and then I can fold that little bit of overhang back over and I'm not going to trust the tape to hold that. I'm going to reinforce that with some CA. Now I'm going to paint this the same dark brown that I used here on the car. While I wait for that paint to dry on the roof I can add these side stakes to the gondola section of the car. And these just get glued to the paper side of the car. They don't get glued down onto the car itself so I can still lift the whole thing off. And these are just O scale 4x4s that I painted to match the car trim. And once again I'll finish this off with some nut bolt washer castings. And I've added some white metal grab irons, one on each side of the car. I believe I got these from Keith Wiseman, Wiseman Model Services. And now the paint is dry on the roof. I'll go ahead and glue that into place. And I've got this smoke jack from a Bachman Passenger Coach. I'll install that right here on the roof. The side frames on these trucks do have brakes so I want to have brake wheels on both the cars. I've added a little square here of a laser board with a hole in it, very rudimentary. And then I found a nice looking brake wheel in my scrap box to finish that off. This one can go right here. All right, now for a little weathering and some final details. I'm going to start by doing a little dry brushing on these side frames. Just using some gray and tan to bring out the details and make them look old and dirty and grimy. I'll hit the nut bolt washer castings I put in and those stirrup stips as well. And then I'll use my colored chalks for the rest of the weathering for the most part. I'm going to gray back this dry transfer decal here. It looks a little bit too new and pristine so I'm going over it with some browns and grays. And then the same thing pretty much on this car. I want to take care with the chalks not to obscure the printed paper detail, which can happen if you overdo it. Honestly I just want to show some road grime, wear and tear. This car's been out in the field for a while. I do want to focus a lot of attention on the roof because that's one of the most visible parts of the model. There's some soot down the middle here from the locomotive and some coming off the smoke jack as well. A little running down the sides, not too much. Now I'll lock all that in with a clear matte finish. All right, final details. Of course barrels are always great. We have to have at least one big crate. Maybe there's dinosaur eggs in there. Maybe have an old map tacked to the wall over here. And we've got to have some rope for repelling down into those dangerous canyons. Of course you can't really have a dig without a shovel or two. Maybe a pickaxe as well. Probably not a bad idea to have some chain handy also. And of course you never know when you might need a ukulele. Well you know I set out to have some fun with this project and I think it's safe to say now that fun has been achieved. Now if you've made it through this entire video and haven't taken a moment to read what's on the side of the car, here let me read it for you. Grant and Sattler Expeditions, Western Institute of Paleontology, Snakewater, Montana. And the number on the car is 93. I wonder if that number has any significance. And that is going to be a wrap on this one. Thank you all so much for watching today. I hope you enjoyed the video and I hope you're subscribed with those notifications turned on so you won't miss the next thing coming from Thunder Mesa Trains. I'll be back again real soon with another project. Until then you can also follow over on Patreon either for free or as a paid member. That's at patreon.com slash thundermesa or on instagram at thunder.mesa or check out the resources available on the Thunder Mesa Studio website at thundermesa.studio. As always my heartfelt thanks to our Patreon members who help to make all of these videos and all of these projects possible. Until next time, keep moving forward everybody. Adios for now.