Deep Inside the Mystery Mine | On18 Thunderbird Mini Layout

Howdy folks, Dave here for Thunder Mesa Trains. Welcome back to the studio. Today I want to pick up right where we left off last time, working on the mystery mine for the ON-18 Thunderbird mini layout. Of course, Thunderbird is the mid-1950s Route 66 roadside attraction themed layout that I've been working on in collaboration with Gary Beatty and some other very fine model makers. And in the next couple of months, you're going to see it getting closer and closer to being finished. At least I hope so. And naturally, Thunderbird has to have a train ride. So we're modeling that in ON-18. If you're not familiar with ON-18, that's 148 scale, O scale, but 18 inch gauge, just 18 scale inches between the rails of the track. So it's very, very small, narrow gauge. It basically runs on the same gauge track as N scale, nine millimeter gauge. Here, let me give you a little visual aid. Up here on the berm above Thunderbird, we have a short section of standard gauge railroad track. And this represents the Santa Fe mainline that runs roughly parallel to Route 66 through a lot of Arizona. So we wanted to have that represented on here. This is a beautiful bit of hand laid Proto 48 track work that was done by our friend, Jake Johnson, who's helping out on the Thunderbird layout. But what I love here is the juxtaposition between this standard gauge track, which most people are used to seeing to the narrow gauge track being used by Thunderbird here. So this is a four foot, eight and a half inches between the rails at standard gauge. And this is 18 inch gauge here for our Thunderbird train ride. You can really, really see the difference between standard gauge class one operations and our rinky dink little park train that we've got running around the place. So both O scale, both 148, this is standard gauge, and this is a very, very narrow gauge. In the comments last week, someone suggested that we place a streamlined Santa Fe coach up here from the fifties, you know, a super chief coach on the tracks. It's an interesting idea. And I did think about that, but unfortunately a streamlined coach from that era is 85 feet long. And at scale here, that would be 21 and a quarter inches. Might be a little bit overpowering for the rest of the scene. I just, I just don't think it would fit. And so the climax of our rinky dink little train ride is what we're calling the mystery mine. And it's this subterranean adventure that the train goes through. I think a very early home built version of the Calico mine ride at Knott's Berry Farm. So we have the basic structure here and it's open on this side so people can look in and see what's inside of the mystery mine. And I showed how I built all this and did the framing in the last installment. This week, I'd like to make a really good start on the interior, you know, start putting the mystery into the mystery mine. Unfortunately, I also have a lot of other stuff going on this week. So I think the best thing to do is just jump in and get started and we'll see how far we get. But before I get too much further on this, I want to do a bunch of groundwork here on the floor. This would almost certainly be a poured concrete slab. So I want to make it look a little bit more like that. Of course, you can just, you know, go buy some concrete colored paint, but I'm going to mix up my own with some of these inexpensive craft acrylics using some of this Apple Barrel Country Gray and some Territorial Beige. A little bit more of the gray than the beige. That should give us a pretty close approximation of a concrete color. Concrete is always a lot more tan than people tend to think it is. You tend to think that it's gray. Well, it is gray, but it's really a grayish tan. Not going to come all the way up to the track because I want to ballast the track through the tunnel here next. Now with that dry, you can see we've got a pretty good concrete color. And the next thing I want to do is measure out about a half an inch or two scale feet from the ends of the ties on each end. I'm going to do this on both sides of the track. And I'm going to pencil in a line here. And the lines are to help me locate these six by six guide timbers. And I want these on here because I'm going to ballast this track through here. And that will give a nice clean edge to the ballast as it goes through the mystery mine. And it serves another purpose as well. This tells me the absolute guest envelope, they would say in the theme park business, how close things can be to the passing train. I can't put anything any closer to that. So this tells me exactly what the clearance is going to be also. And I'm going to be using some Woodland Scenics medium gray ballast here. We're also going to be using this when we do the parking lot because we figured that a little operation like this, they'd probably just buy a couple of big, you know, truckloads of gravel and use it for everything. So this works well for that. Got some in my Dixie cup right down the center. Come back and go along the shoulders of the track as well. Not doing all of the track today, just this part that's coming through the mine here and the approaches on each side. You can see how those guard timbers keep the ballast from getting away from me. And I like to go back and manicure everything with a soft brush. I'm sure I don't have any ballast up in the webbing of the rail, up where it's going to interfere with the yields of the locomotives and the cars. Now I've been told that you can just, you know, whack the track with a spoon and have the vibration cause the ballast to settle down between the ties. I haven't had much luck with that technique myself, so I still do it this way with a brush. Works fine, just takes a little patience. Once I have that ballast all manicured the way I want it, take some 70% isopropyl alcohol and I'll use a pipette to apply it to the ballast because I want to wet all of this down, hold it in place until I can get some glue on there. Nice thing about using the isopropyl alcohol is that it doesn't have any surface tension unlike water, so it won't cause the ballast to run away when you put the liquid on there. I prefer to use a pipette just to, you know, dribble it on a little drop at a time. If you put it in a spray bottle it's going to, it's going to blow your ballast all over the place. At least it does mine. And just as soon as you get all that ballast wetted down you want to come back with the diluted white glue. You don't want to wait because that isopropyl alcohol is going to evaporate very quickly. I'm just going to drizzle on the white glue. And this is a three-to-one mixture, this is three parts water to one part white glue. And you know you've got the right amount of glue on there when it starts to puddle up white like that. Okay, I'll let that dry overnight. Come back and get to work on the mystery in the mystery mine. Not bad. Make sure the shed still fits. Perfect. Now I'll just clean the glue off the railhead with some odorless mineral spirits. Make sure the train still runs through here. Yeah, see that still works pretty well. Now I've been trying to figure out the individual scenes that we're going to have inside of the mystery mine. There's not room for a whole lot. I think we're going to have three basic scenes where the train enters right here. The first half of this section is going to be framed like a like a mine tunnel just to kind of bring people into the story. And then maybe sort of a bat cave right here. And then we enter into the big underground cavern room right here. And all of this is going to be illuminated by UV light. Now to build the interior sets I'm going to be using some of this Crescent 300 illustration board. It's extremely easy to cut and paint and work with. At scale it's a little bit too thick to represent the plywood flats that I'm supposed to be building here. But I think once it's all painted up it'll look just fine. The first part I'm working on is that square timbered mine section. I'm really taking my cues here from the Calico Mine Riot at Knott's. So the first thing I want to do is take this piece of illustration board and paint it to look like rock. But not good rock. You know what I mean? It's got to look like someone painted it to look like rock in their garage. That's basically the idea here. So starting with a little bit of burnt sienna. This is a dark ride so we want it to be dark. I'm going to stipple on some burnt umber. Give it kind of a rocky texture. Mix in a little bit of that raw sienna. Keep stippling. Now mix that burnt umber with some black and come back with a smaller brush. Add some really obvious looking cracks here in the rock wall. Now come back with that raw sienna once again. Use it straight out of the tube and I'm adding some highlights just to the right side and the bottom edge of these rocks or boulders or whatever. So it looks like they're catching light. Maybe someone working at Thunderbird is at a little bit of training in theatrical flats. Now I want to take some Vallejo gold and add a really obvious looking vein of ore running through the rock here. Starting over here and going down on this side. Then for the actual mine timbers I've got some 6x12s. I'm staining those with my Rejuvenate Furniture Repair markers. Medium gray. Measure halfway between these and put the last one there. Now flip this over. Color the back with some Minwax Early American. Remember these are supposed to be plywood flats. This part's not really going to show so I'm not going to put a lot of detail into it but I wanted to get some color on there. Now I want to add a little framing to the back side with some 3x6 braces and I've got some 6x6 feet to help it stand up. And a 45 degree angle brace also cut from 6x6. Make it nice and sturdy. And there is our first set piece ready to be installed in the Mystery Mine. Now this should fit in here. I've been weighing the pros and cons of this and in the final analysis I think it's going to be better to build the rest of all this in place. That is glue the shed down to the layout and build everything right here. So I think that's what we're going to do. I may regret it later but I'm having a hard time seeing how to move forward without doing that. So that's what we're going to do. So that means before I do anything else on the interior I need to finish this man door over here on this side. That's pretty easy. This is a very basic door. Just cut a piece of illustration board to fit the opening. I'm going to add some wood grain with my razor saw and then paint it to look like aged wood with my watercolors. Using my usual mixture of burnt sienna and cobalt blue to make a nice silvery gray which should match this stain really well. And I'll go back over that again. Add some lines to enhance the grain. And I'll paint all the edges too. The interior side is not really going to show so stain markers on that. Measure up about three, three and a half scale feet from the bottom. Drill a hole through here and have a doorknob. These pico track nails work really well for that. Hold that in place with some cyanoacrylate. Reinforced kick with a little baking soda and just snip that off. I'll add a sign to keep curious tourists from wandering where they don't belong. And I can glue that into the opening. Now I'll just trim that out with some one by fours. This door is located over behind the teepees in the Indian village so I guess this would sort of be the emergency exit from a ride if it should break down in the tunnel. Okay now I can finish working on the inside. I may regret this but I'm going to glue this down with a few spots of Eileen's. Making sure I get it in just exactly the right spot. I can glue this in. The next set piece I want to add is the mirror image of this on this side of the track but it's going to be visible from the back side so that requires a little bit of creative engineering. Now if I were to build this as a true mirror image of the piece I just made well then you wouldn't be able to see inside the tunnel. So my solution is I'm going to cut part of it out so you'll be able to see the backs of the plywood flats but you'll still be able to see through it also. This side faces the track, this side faces the viewer. I'll just cut this in a rocky profile. It sort of matches what I painted on the other side so it'll be like you're looking in there through those painted rocks. There we go. So you'll look through from this side and I want the good side of the illustration board facing out towards the viewer because I'm going to paint it to look like sheets of plywood with my watercolors. I considered using that thin model airplane plywood for this because hey you know it already looks like plywood. It is plywood but I decided to use this illustration board instead because it's basically just easier to work with. So I'm going to use basically the same trick for all of the set pieces which are on the viewer side so you can see through them and see to the the interior of the mine and the trick to you know doing this faux plywood painting is really just to keep going over it and adding lots of little lines, lots of grain. Watercolor is very forgiving. So now I've painted the rocks on this side and added those 6x12 mine timbers. Now I want to frame all of this in like it's a flat. I'm using some 3x6 for this and I'm staining it with the light gray to make it look like it's lumber that didn't come from the lumber yard that long ago and realistically this probably would have been done with 2x4s but I'm over building the whole thing a little bit to make it chunkier looking. Next I'll add the upright braces and these are purely cosmetic but I've got a couple more braces horizontally across here. A detail I always see on these theatrical flats is they have these corner gussets which are usually made out of plywood. I'm going to make some out of bristol board. I just finished coloring it with a little bit Minwax Early American and cut some little triangles out of this. Put a little glue on the backs of these and for these central uprights just take one of these triangles put it on this way and then these horizontal pieces just get these little straight cleats like this. Then I'll use my nail hole tool to add some nail holes and this is just a track nail and a pin vise. Works really well for this. Now I want a little writing on the back like you know notations when they were putting the whole thing together. I've got a red colored pencil. Presumably the other side would be scene 1A. Top up here. Just the kind of things you see written on the back of these flats. I mentioned earlier that the interior of the Mystery Mine is going to be lit with UV light. Black light. And I've got some nice three millimeter UV LEDs over here that I'm going to use. But for this first scene this is actually a transition between the bright you know sunny outdoors to the dark part of the mine. So in this part I want to have the flickering lantern light. So I've got a three millimeter yellow flickering LED that I'm going to install in this part of the wall here. So I've got some quarter inch black plastic tubing which I'm going to use to make the light fixtures. I'm going to cut off a piece that's about oh let's see one two three five eighths of an inch long. And so the LED is going to fit inside of this and I'll use this to direct the light. By the way I get these LEDs online from a company called Lighthouse LEDs. They're all pre-wired with resistors that I need. They're all ready to go. Saves a little bit of time. Now I need to cut a hole through my flat. Now I can feed these wires through here. That plastic tubing a nice press fit into that hole. Now I'm using a five minute epoxy to glue this tubing in here from the back. Just putting the glue on the tubing and not on the LED. Let that set up for a few minutes probably more than five. Now with that epoxy all set up I'm building a gray electrical box to hide all of this in. The cables are going to be visible. Usually I try to hide the wires in these models but this time I want the cables to be visible behind the scenes so you can see the power going to the different light fixtures and things. I'll be either replacing this yellow wire or painting it black so all of the cables will be black. And for my electrical box once again I'm using the same illustration board just cutting it to size for the pieces that I need and then painting that with granite gray. I've got a good looking warning label from my scrap box that I can put on here to keep people from getting electrocuted. Now I use my watercolors to add some dirt and grime and rust to this using different mixtures of the cobalt blue and burnt sienna. I'm dabbing it on and then swirling it around. Now it looks like it's been there a while. Straight burnt sienna right out of the tube is great for adding little rust spots and things. Now I can add the six by six feet like I did on the other side and then these angled braces. I'm going to run the cable right through the braces just like you would in real life. Keep them out of the way. And I believe that is now ready to install. Let's see. Not a bad fit. Now I want to finish this first scene off by framing in the roof of the mine tunnel. Also the idea here is this is one of those scenes the train comes through this very narrow space and then it opens up and you get this big reveal on the other side. At least that's the way I'm planning it. Now I've painted a piece of illustration board for the ceiling to match the over-exaggerated rock walls. Just slide this into place. I've hooked up a nine volt battery to the wires here so you can see the effect. So I've added another small flat right here that angles back towards the main wall and this provides an access point for backstage and for that side door. And I figured that in a place like this they would probably just have a black curtain there. So that's what I did. I took a piece of black cotton cloth and glued it on the back and stiffened it with some diluted white glue because this is where the scene kind of opens up into what's going to be the bat cave. And that's what I want to work on next. And the first piece I want to build for that is basically going to go up against this framework right here. Now I have a piece of illustration board cut to fit here and right now I'm figuring out the maximum and minimum clearances. Maximum for the the framing of the wall and minimum for the tightest possible space that the train can fit through because this is going to be a rough opening unlike the mine tunnel it's going to be more like a cave entrance. And now I can sketch in the the rough shape I want to cut out based on those measurements. Something like that. There. Now before I paint this I'll test it with the train to make sure everything fits. The idea here now is that we're headed back into a deeper darker part of the mine so I painted the the good side of the illustration board flat black and used my wood stain markers on the back here and just indicated you know old brush strokes around the edges there like it was hand painted. I'm going to change up the palette a little bit. I'm going to start by stippling on some of this burnt umber over on the right side and it's going to transition into blue over on this side. Next I'll bring in some of this light blue and mix it with a little bit of that ultramarine and we use that color to define the edges of some of these rock shapes where where the light whatever light there is down there would be hitting them. It's always really important with something like this doing any kind of backdrop painting or faux painting or whatever to choose a light source and stick with it. In this case I've chosen you know high and to the left so whatever light there is is coming down this way. Now this can be glued into place and up against those studs. I've added another little scenery flat up here hanging from the rafters and I'll continue to add little bits and pieces like that as I develop the scene but right now I'm getting ready to add the first real black light effect so I need to mount a three millimeter ultraviolet led to the roof trusses up here. So once again I've inserted the led into a length of this black plastic tubing to act as sort of a lighting fixture and I've got a piece of heavy duty 3m industrial strength foam tape on the back should be more than enough to hold it. Now I just need to position it here pointing down into this corner this section of the back wall. I want to get the light in place because then that's going to help me to position the scene elements. Now I have a panel that I painted just straight flat black and I've got some orange black light paint some yellow orange it says actually but it looks just pretty orange to me and use some of that applied with a toothpick and what I want to do here is create the look of eyes peering out of the darkness. Take my toothpick and put two little dots close together like that in pairs and then when this is installed I'm going to add cutout flats around it so it looks like you're looking back into this little antechamber and there are things in there looking back at you. Presumably bats or maybe something more sinister who knows. Now when these dry against the black they're almost invisible but they should show up well into the UV light. Now I have it glued in against the back wall. I can test it out here with my nine volt battery. Oh yeah that works. Now I have the rest of the set pieces in on this side. You can see I layered it so we've got a piece here and a piece back here and then that black piece with the eyes on it. Oh I love it it's like a magic trick. So here's that next set piece for the viewer's side. So remember we're viewing it from the back we're backstage here and as you can see I've decided to add some bats. They're very tiny but I designed these and cut them out on the laser using some black polyback which is a kind of a plastic reinforced paper and now I'm installing them on short lengths of music wire. Before I cut them off the sheet I've got a number 72 bit in my pin vise a hole right through the middle of them and I can take and bend the wings up a little bit or down. So I want to cut a piece of this music wire put a dab of CA on one end and stick that into the hole I just drilled. Bat skewers. Now I want to drill a hole down through this board to receive that music wire. Actually better if I don't go all the way through. A dab of CA there and install our bat. And as soon as that CA is set up I'll touch this up a little bit paint that wire with some flat black that's not shiny. There we go. Bats. That needs to go. Okay I've finished up this section by adding one more flat here with some cavern style holes to look through so you can see the interior. I've also finished adding all of the roof trusses here and the main ridge pole. Added some temporary connections here so that I can hook this up to the layout's 9 volt DC system and test all of the lighting together make sure everything's working properly. And last but not least a little temporary roof out of some cardboard so uh give us an idea of what it'll look like when it's all finished and there's less light coming in from the top. All right let's turn everything on. Oh I love it when a plan comes together. Not that I really had much of a plan I've been making this whole thing up as I go along and now I can see by the clock on the wall that we're about out of time so this is probably a good place to wrap it up for this week. And to be honest this has taken a lot longer than I expected it to. It seems like a pretty simple and straightforward project but once you get into it you realize that it's actually a lot more work to show those behind the scenes views than it would be to just build the dang scene. And there was a lot of off-camera trial and error with this that I don't want to inflict on you guys. Most of the time I prefer it to at least look like I know what I'm doing. So now it looks like I'll be coming back with a part three of the mystery mine and in that one I'll be finishing up the big cavern scene over here now that I know how to do it. And then I want to build the approach tunnels on each side with the 1950s vintage faux rock work that should be pretty fun. And then there's a lot of little details to add you know cans of paint misplaced tools all the kinds of things that you'd find backstage. And of course the roof needs to be finished. So yeah there's more stuff to do. So I'll be back next time with another installment of the mystery mine. And until then I want to thank you all for watching and subscribing and continuing to support the channel. Remember you can also follow Thunder Mesa for free or as a contributing member over on Patreon. That's at patreon.com slash thundermesa or follow us on instagram at thunder.mesa or check out the resources that are available on the Thunder Mesa Studio website at thundermesa.studio. As always a huge thank you to our Patreon members who help to make these projects and these videos possible. Until next time, keep moving forward everybody. Adios for now.