Finishing the Mystery Mine | On18 Thunderbird Mini Layout

Howdy folks, Dave here for Thunder Mesa Trains. Welcome back to the studio where this week I am still working on the ON18 Thunderbird mini layout. In fact, I'll likely be working on it for most of the rest of this month as we're trying to get this thing finished for our annual mini layout get-together out in Southern California. Now, if you don't remember, the Thunderbird layout is the ON18 mini layout that I'm working on in collaboration with Gary Beatty and Jake Johnson and Bob Koerner and Scott Carter. And it depicts a typical roadside attraction of the 1950s somewhere out along Route 66 in the Arizona desert. Now, our take on this roadside attraction is that it should have a miniature railroad, which of course it should. And that's the ON18 part. It's an O scale layout, that's 148 scale, a quarter inch equals one foot. But the railway that's running through the whole thing is 18 inch narrow gauge, so very small kind of park train gauge. And you can achieve that in O scale mostly by using N gauge track and wheels and components and things like that, and then just build O scale size bodies on top of them. And that's a real oversimplification, but if you've come this far on the journey with me, I'm sure you understand what I'm talking about by now. And for the last couple of installments, I've been working on this structure right here, what we're calling the Mystery Mine. It's sort of the dark ride finale for our park train. It's more than halfway finished, and I really want to get it done in this episode. And as I showed you last time, there's a lot going on here inside of the Mystery Mine because we're trying to give you basically a behind-the-scenes look into how this home-built dark ride is put together, so you can see the backs of the flats and the cables and the components and things in here. And there's one more big scene to build right here, but before I jump into that, I actually wanted to take a little break from working on the interior and finish up the tunnel entrances, or tunnel entrance here, and exit over here on each side of the building. And that requires some faux rock work. As you can see here, I've already finished the tunnel portal and the rock work over on this side. This is the entrance where the trains enter the Mystery Mine. And I did all this while you weren't looking because I needed to figure some things out. It's not as straightforward as you might think. I've done a lot of rock work on Thunder Mesa and the other layouts, but for this one, I wanted rocks that looked good enough, but not too good. We're not going for Disney quality here. I wanted that look of, you know, home-built, basically sprayed gunite on chicken wire like you'd see at an early Knott's Berry farm and things like that. So I'll show you exactly the techniques I used and how I achieved this look as we build the tunnel exit on the other side. So the main ingredient for our fake rocks that are meant to look fake is this green dry floral foam. You can pick this stuff up at the Walmart floral department or Hobby Lobby, places like that. It's easy to find. It's very soft, cuts and carves very easily, does not hold fine detail well, and that's actually an advantage in this case. We're not going after fine detail. We want it to look just a little bit sloppy and homemade. This stuff comes in a lot of shapes and sizes. These blocks are about two inches thick, and that's what I prefer for this kind of thing. I'm probably going to need to do this in one, two, maybe two or three chunks to fill this space right here between the end of the building and the beginning of this little berm. So I need a piece that's going to be about three and a half inches tall by about four and an eighth wide, and that's a good place to start. So very, very easy to carve and cut, but it does make quite a mess. So I have a shop vac standing by. I'm just using a razor saw blade right through that like butter. I'll make it a little bit bigger than my measurement because as you cut and carve, you tend to lose a little bit of material here and there. Okay, now I just need to cut out an opening. I do have a template that I use for these ON-18 tunnel portals, but it's actually a little big for this, so I'm going to kind of guesstimate. The nice thing about this floral foam is it's so soft that I can just press down and it'll leave an indentation of the rails on the bottom, and that'll give me a good place to start. I'll just mark the edges of the roadbed inside and the outside, and my absolute minimum vertical clearance is two and a half inches, and I'll do the same thing on the other side. This is a little tricky here because the track actually curves. I'll just kind of freehand that. A keyhole type saw blade works a little bit better for this kind of thing. I'm just cutting this the bare minimum now, and then I'll go back and refine the opening quite a bit. Of course, testing as I go, running the train through there, making sure there's good clearance and nothing hangs up. I've done a little bit more carving in there to make sure that the train fits through with no issues, so now I want a second piece which is going to kind of angle like this. All right, and again, I'll run the train through there a couple of times to make sure we've got good clearance. Now I've carved a recess down in here because I want to add basically a tar paper roof up here to remind viewers that this is a built structure. These aren't real rocks. They're probably made out of, you know, concrete block with chicken wire over the top and then sprayed with gunite to add a rocky texture to it, so I'm going to have a little bit of piece of roof right up here. Now I want to glue these two pieces together so I can do the rest of the finish work on them as one piece. Now I can do the final shaping on this, and the first thing I want to do is carve out recesses for the 12 by 12 timbers of the portal here. The easiest way to do that is to take some O scale 12 by 12s and then just push them down into this soft foam, and I can just cut that out with my hobby knife. Now I already know that I have adequate clearance as long as I don't go out any farther than that boundary right there, and I'll add one across the top. Now I'll stain these and we'll glue them into place once all of the rock carving and painting and finishing is done. Now I can do the rest of the shaping, and all I really need for that is a utility knife, a hard lead pencil, and some sandpaper. I'm not going for anything too fancy, keeping this very basic and blocky and home-built looking, like I said. I'm putting about half as much time and effort into this rock work as I would ordinarily do. One thing I can do is take this edge of the sanding block and do that, so it kind of looks like it's draped, like that sprayed gunite rock work often looks, because they just, you know, they lay out some canvas or some chicken wire and and spray this concrete over the top, so it often has kind of a draped appearance to it. Not going to do anything at all on this side, except we're going to paint it to look like concrete, because this is the backstage portion of the rock work. I think that's pretty close to what I want. I've also created this little wing piece coming out like that, makes it a little bit more mysterious, and now I'm going to cover this entire surface, all these foam pieces, with some of this stuff, this Woodland Scenics Flex Paste, and this is going to do a couple of things. One, it will greatly strengthen this foam, and two, it's going to create a textured surface, which will look a lot like sprayed concrete when all is said and done. First, I just want to get an even coating, thin it down a little bit, over the entire piece here. I suspect that this Woodland Scenics Flex Paste is nothing more than acrylic modeling paste, which you can pick up at just about any good art supplier. They tend to do that. They'll take some well-known art supply and rename it, put their name on it, and sell it for twice as much. Woodland Scenics will never be a sponsor of this channel because I say things like that. That's why we are member-supported, folks, so I can give you my honest, unvarnished opinion on these things. Now, once that initial coat is dry to the touch, I'm going to come back and go over all of the parts that are supposed to be rock with a second, thicker coat, and I'm stippling it on like this. Not brushing, stabbing, stippling, and that's to simulate that gunite, that sprayed concrete texture. I'm modeling fake rocks here, but of course you can use these exact same techniques to model rocks that are supposed to be real. Just, you know, add a little bit more refinement. I used all of these same techniques when I was doing the little Rainbow Peak micro layout, if you happen to follow that one. I'll give you a close-up view so you can see that texture that I'm adding there. Now, with that flex paste dry, I can go ahead and start painting the rocks, the faux rocks, and I'm using two colors, basically. Some raw sienna and some unbleached titanium, and these are artist's acrylics. I'm going to start by just painting all of the rock surfaces with that raw sienna, using it as a base coat. If you follow some of my other projects, you might notice that these are the same basic colors that I often use for southwestern rock work. The difference here is that, well, it's going to be in the amount of refinement. One thing I often see in rock work that doesn't look realistic is they don't spend a lot of time, you know, trying to tone down the saturation of the paint and giving it a dry and dusty look. It's all just a little bit too bright, a little bit too vivid, much more bright and vivid than real rocks usually are. So, that's kind of what we're going for here. Okay, I lied. Well, actually, I just changed my mind. I decided to add another color back here, some burnt umber, dark brown, because I want this back end of the tunnel where the train is emerging from the depths of the mystery mine to be a little bit darker. I'm just blending it now into that raw sienna I just put on. So, it'll kind of transition gradually from darker to lighter. But that's really all I'm going to do inside of the tunnel here. I'm not going to do anything else very fancy. And then as soon as that raw sienna is dry, I'll take some of this unbleached titanium and mix the two of those together, about 50-50 or so. And then I'm just going to hit the tops like that. Just add a little highlight. And I'm really not going to do much more than this. So, you can see it's a little bit brighter, a little bit more garish than rocks I would ordinarily do. And that is by design. Ordinarily, I would have done a dark wash in between these steps, in between the base coat and what I'm doing now. But here I'm skipping that. And that dark wash, what that does is it darkens the shadows and it also helps to desaturate the paint job a little bit. And for all the rest of this, all of the backstage parts, I just want that to look like concrete. So, I'm going to take some of this apple barrel country gray, a little bit of this beige to it, a tiny bit. It should give us a nice concrete color. These craft paints usually take a couple of coats. Maybe I should paint this go away green. You know, you know. Now I can glue in those timbers. Now I can glue this down to the layout and to the building. Fit snugly. And then this wing piece. Now I've cut a piece of cardboard to fit as the roof. And I've added a six by six to this side so it'll slope down towards the edge of the layout. Now I've added some tar paper to the roof using black construction paper. Glue this into place. Now I'll come back and weather all of this when I do the final weathering for the structure. So I've decided that some sort of mine head frame would look really cool up on the roof of that little section of tunnel that we just made. So I started work on this. So far I've just got this little platform. And this whole thing is based on a mine head frame from the early days of Knott's Berry Farm. I found an old photo. I was going through some old photos of Knott's last night and I found this one shot of the Lucky Kuss mine. And I'll throw it up on the screen there so you can see. And I thought, well that's just perfect. Coming up with something similar to that, not exactly the same, but something that has that same sort of rough hewn look. And so far I've got the top platform done. It's just 8x8s and some coffee stir sticks. And now I'm working on the uprights. I've got some 1 16th of an inch thick rounds that I'm using, some dowels for those. I'm working without a plan here or anything. I'm just kind of going from what I can observe in the photo from the seat of my pants, guesstimating the dimensions, you know, just seeing what looks right to my eye. This drawing right here has nothing to do with this head frame. This is an old template. And I'm just reusing the foam core and the grid paper here so I can line things up. This is always fun trying to build things in midair. A little double stick tape on here so I can hold these pieces in position, more or less. And I've got some pencil marks on here to line these up. The real Lucky Cuss mine was actually down in Tombstone, Arizona. Great name for a mine, Lucky Cuss. I think Knott's just borrowed the name. Pretty sure they built the head frame from whatever they had lying around. So far, so good. I can't believe that worked. Now I'm drilling some holes down through the roof, trying to just go through the cardboard and not too deeply through the foam. Put the legs through there. I can adjust that so it's nice and level. I notice in the photo there are some iron straps going over the top of this yoke here for extra strength. So I want to add those. And those are pretty easy to model. Just using some Bristol board, cut into some one-eighth of an inch wide strips. Add a little scoring here so I can fold it over the top. And we'll color those using a brown Sharpie, which does a really nice job of simulating the look of old rusted iron. Don't forget the edges. Add a couple of bolt holes with a hard lead pencil. That's really all I need to do. Bend that over the top. Touch it up here where I bent it. Use my burnt sienna watercolors. A little bit of rust staining coming down into the wood. Interestingly here on the photo, I could see that they didn't have a sheave wheel on the Lucky Cuss mine. Just a big pulley, block and tackle really, up there. So I think we will do that on our version. Cut a piece of music wire, bend it into a little teeny hook here. Put that up through a hole I just drilled. Put some CA on the wire and push it home into that hole. Then I can just trim off this end and paint that to look like a bolt coming out. Then I've got this nice white metal casting, block and tackle. I think this is from Weissman Model Services. It's either Weissman or Berkshire Valley, one of the two. I can't really remember at the moment. I'll hook that through the wire I just put in there and secure that in place with some CA also. And I think I'll finish the rest of this in place on the structure. A little bit of glue on the feet. Push these down into those holes. That's as level as I can get it. And now I can add all of the diagonal bracing, which on the prototype is just logs. Each one of those is pretty much a custom fit. On these rear supports, I'm having to cheat a little bit and putting them down a little bit lower than they should be. Otherwise they would intersect with the roof and there just wasn't any way to make that work. And the last one. This was a fun angle to figure out. Now I want to run some cable through the pulley and I've got some number 10 crochet thread here that I've dyed with some watercolors, kind of a grayish brown. And I figure that since this isn't a real mine, they would probably just have this tied off down here to a cinder block or block of wood or something like that. I've got a block of wood here. Secure that at the bottom and I'll run the other end through the pulley. I'm going to tie this end off. Let's see. Let me just have it go under the roof right up there. I actually ended up drilling a little hole up here at the top of the wall and running the cable through there and gluing it just inside. Okay, I'm pretty happy with that. Now I can finish up the rest of the interior and get the roof on this thing. Well, I hope you don't mind. I've skipped ahead a little bit of painting and installing some of the flats for this section of the Mystery Mine. Now these are layered flats done on illustration board and painted with acrylics, including some UV reactive acrylics, pretty much exactly the same way as I built the flats for this section in the last episode. But now I want to build a diffused lighting unit. I have some UV LEDs, three millimeter ultraviolet LEDs for this, but they're very hot. They're very directional. They point, you know, right at something and it's very hot light. So what I want to do is build a diffuser that will hang up here in the rafters and have the lights installed inside of that. This is one of the three millimeter ultraviolet LEDs I'm going to use. I get these all pre-wired. They've got the resistor already installed on them, so they're just ready to plug into whatever kind of system you're using. They operate on 9 to 16 volts, but as you can see, they're very directional, very hot, just pointing in that one direction, and that's the reason I want to build a diffuser for them. So I want to make what amounts to a long skinny rectangular box with some fogged clear acrylic on one side. And I'm going to make the whole thing out of illustration board, since I'm building everything else out of illustration board, might as well. So I want to glue that onto there at a right angle. This is about four and a half inches long. It will be when it's done. The other side under here like this, making sort of a little trough shape. And then I can glue one of the ends on like this. Give that a little bit more structural stability while I'm working on it. Cool thing about LEDs is that you can modify this plastic lamp here. You can sand it down, and that will help diffuse the light. And I've done that before on some of these, but since I'm working with multiples, I kind of want to spread the light out. That's why I'm building this diffusion box. If it was just one, I would probably just take an emery board and sand it down, and that would diffuse the light, spread it out a little bit. I wanted to get really fancy with this. I could put something reflective on the inside, some mylar or even aluminum foil would work, but I think it just being white on the inside will probably be enough. And to position these in here, I've got a couple of squares of this industrial strength 3M double-sided foam tape. Now the fun part is always getting the backing off of this stuff. Okay, now I want to take and bend the lamp up so it's going to be pointed at the diffuser. Let's do the same thing. Now I want to gang all of these wires together, keeping track of the polarity. You want the red to the red and the black to the black. I've always got to remind you that LEDs are polarity specific. If you hook them up the wrong way, they won't work. Cut this off right about there. Get some insulation off. I want to solder these connections. I've got some 6040 rosin core lead solder. Soldering these up. Do some longer hookup wires that'll carry power from the 9-volt DC bus, which powers all the lights and accessories underneath the layout. I'll just protect these connections with some black heat shrink tubing. Now I can seal up this end. Test my connections, make sure everything still works. Yep, that's good. Now cut a piece of clear acrylic to fit on the top there. The stuff that's going to do the diffusing is this Avery label material. Put that right on top of the acrylic. I'm actually going to double this and get a little bit more diffusion. Diffusion, by the way, I keep using that word, just means to scatter the light. I want the light to be scattered rather than focused. And I'll glue that around the edges with some zap canopy glue. I suppose you could use cyanoacrylate superglue also. In this case, it doesn't really matter. This just makes for a little bit cleaner job. You just drop that right on there. And there's our completed UV light diffusion bar. I went ahead and painted the outside flat black too because, you know, this is a professional organization and we want things to look nice. And this is going to go right here between the roof trusses. I'm going to cant it down at an angle like that. I can make some fine adjustments before I secure that in place. But for now, put a temporary roof on here. Let's see how it looks. Lift this up temporarily. Yeah, okay, that's working. Block the overhead light a little bit. There we go. I want to show you how this fits in here between the roof trusses. Created a little bracket here out of illustration board and added a piece of scrap wood on here. So this can just fit in between these roof trusses. And then this little piece of illustration board locks it into place and positions it correctly pointing down at the scene. This whole section of roof right here will remain removable so I can access the interior of the for, you know, maintenance repairs and track cleaning and things like that. If I ever need to change the lights, that kind of stuff. And the wires run here from the light bar through the roof trusses down behind one of these flats and then out through a 3 16th hole that I drilled down through the MDF floor. And then they go down through this slot, cut into the foam, and underneath the layout to hook up to the 9-volt DC lighting and accessory bus. And just as a refresher, this is the 9-volt DC bus I was just referencing. And all that spider web of wires, those are all coming from all the different LED lamps on the layout. And this thing is powered by one of these. This is a 9-volt DC adapter, DC transformer, affectionately known as a wall wart. So this is just a little power distribution strip hooked up to this. And on one side it has the positive leads, on the other side it has the negative. Couldn't be much more simple than that. And by the way, I will clean up all this wiring down here so it's not such a such a spider web. And now that all that's hooked up, I should be able to just plug this in and it'll have power to all the lights in the Mystery Mine and, you know, everything else on the layout. Now I need to finish up the flats for this side. Remember, this is a behind-the-scenes view where we're looking through cutouts in the scenery at what the people are seeing on the train. So I will give you a little refresher on how I build those flats, and then I'll figure out how to hide all of this wiring in plain sight. I went into quite a bit of detail on how I create these miniature flats in the last installment, so I'm just going to give you the Cliff Notes version this time. Basically, I'm using some crescent illustration board to represent around five-eighths inch plywood. And whichever side is facing towards the viewer, that's because I'm going to use the good side of the illustration board, the drawing and painting side. Illustration board like this usually has one good side and then it has the backing on it like that. So in this case, the back of the flat is facing towards the viewer. So this side would be facing towards the little people on the train. So I'm going to paint this to look like plywood. And that's the reason I'm using illustration board. It's very easy to cut and shape, and it's very easy to color with different types of media. I'm using watercolors here. This is some burnt sienna and cobalt blue. And, you know, I do a little wash on here, mix those together to make a nice kind of warm gray, and then go back and add, you know, grain going in different directions. And it does a pretty effective job of representing the look of plywood. I could have used real plywood, you know, like some model airplane plywood or something like that. But in my experience, that stuff is really hard to cut and shape. This is so much easier to work with, which is why I decided to go with an illustration board. And now this side is going to be facing towards the train and away from the viewer. No one's going to see this. So we're just going to paint this flat black with acrylics. Now, this side was facing towards the viewer. I would render out the rocks with acrylic paints and use my blacklight paints and things like that if it was going to be under blacklight. But since it won't be seen, I'm just going to go flat black. I've had several people suggest that I should do a ride-through video, you know, have a train with a camera on it, a little GoPro. I don't know if I can get a GoPro small enough to work on an ON-18 track. There probably is one out there. The thing is about that, you know, it could be kind of cool, kind of interesting. The thing is, is that these models are designed to be seen by 1-1 scale humans who are standing next to them. They're not designed to be seen by 1-48 scale humans, because the 1-48 scale humans are plastic and they don't have any eyes. I like to use a small flat brush like this, and then I can make little brush strokes, bringing that paint around the edges as if this was all painted by my hand. Well, it is all painted by hand, as if it was all painted by a 1-48 scale hand. Now I'm adding some 3x6 bracing to the back, and if you built any theater flats in college or anything like that, this type of construction should look very familiar. And I like to use a light gray stain marker on these to give the lumber a little bit of age, but I don't want it to look, you know, too old and worn out. These are probably overbuilt from a theatrical standpoint, but seeing as how this is for a dark ride that's meant to be a little more permanent, probably need to be built a little bit more sturdy than you would for a temporary production. Then once I get that framed, I'll go back with some Bristol board, which I've also stained with my markers, and use that to make some triangular corner braces. This is a pretty much a standard feature you see on these kinds of flats. They're usually cut from thin plywood, and then you'll see them in places like this to strengthen those joints. And then places where those triangular braces won't fit, just use some straight little cleats like that. This one has quite a lot of bracing since it's such a odd shape. Now with all those in place, I can use my nail hole tool to add some nail holes. And it's always fun to add some notes to the back, like when they were putting this together, they had to mark the flats so they'd go in the right place. This is scene three. I'm just using a colored pencil for that, red colored pencil. Now that's ready to install in the scene. This is designed to fit here behind these wires, that way the wires snake around that little opening. And speaking of the wires, I want to paint any visible red or yellow wires flat black, more like cables. Now at this point, some of you may well be asking, what is the big mystery in the mystery mine? I mean, after all, so far it's just underground scenes and some bats and some black light. Well, if there was one thing that was almost as big as cowboys and Indians in the 1950s, it was flying saucer movies. So the big reveal, the big mystery in the mystery mine is, in a word, aliens. Our first encounter on the train ride is going to be over here. There's going to be a flying saucer crashed right beneath the balancing rock here. It's a scene I haven't finished yet. I'll probably do it in the next episode. I got this cool little flying saucer off of eBay and it's going to be crashed right over here. And that's going to set up the final scene, the big reveal inside the mystery mine. This is a 3D printed figure that Bob Kerner sent me. I think he got the plans for it off of Thingiverse, but it is a hilarious little alien. And of course the gag here is that he's dressed like a tourist. He's holding a camera and he's got an aloha shirt on and everything else. I just finished painting him up with black light paint and he's going to be greeting the riders on the train in the final scene inside the mystery mine. So he's a tourist just like they are, though he's probably come from much farther away. And of course having an alien in here, that follows a grand tradition of cheesy roadside attractions. Places like, you know, The Thing. What is it? Well, you know, it's always aliens, right? Always. As you can see, I've already made a good start on the roof on this side of the mystery mine. And these are some illustration board panels with some corrugated material from Full Circle Models. I'm using two different kinds here, the printed rusty corrugation and the ones that are just plain gray. And we'll blend all that together with some weathering at the end. Right now I want to take off this temporary roof and build the removable section that's going to go right here. So I've cut the rafter tails off of all of the remaining roof trusses and then installed them into the rafter slots here. And then I want to finish up this short section of roof on this end. And I'm just using that same crescent illustration board. I've stained it with my wood stain markers on the underside. And I've given myself a line here at approximately the eight foot mark, eight feet from the eaves there, so I can position the corrugated material. And the same thing on the other side. And I've got a couple of pieces of two by six trim for the end of the roof here. And I want to add that now because the corrugated roofing is actually going to overlap. Now I'm cutting and fitting the panels for the removable section. That's very much a custom job. Now I'll take some painter's tape and line these panels up as perfectly as I can on each side. Now theoretically, once I put all the internal parts together, this should fit back on here just like that. I'm using the laser cut roof trusses as a template for creating some internal bracing. I need these to be just the right thickness to clear that light bar. Now I've got some lines drawn here where these need to go. I can put glue on this other side. Let's flip this up and put the other two braces in. And I want to paint all that interior flat black. That's just so it doesn't reflect light down inside the model. While that dries, I can go ahead and put together the other roof vent. I decided the building needed some roof vents. You may have seen one on the completed section of roof. And you know, that's because we've got an internal combustion engine going through this thing. And we don't want to asphyxiate the guests. This is some 35 one thousandth of an inch thick laser board that I'm using here to build the vent sides. And then these gabled ends are made of some one sixteenth of an inch thick basswood that matches the same pitch as the rest of the roof. And now I want to paint this whole thing with this flat grayish tan. Now I can glue that vent in place and we can finish the rest of the roof in place on the layout. Like a glove. I'll start right here, right at the edge of that removable section. Once again, I'm using this corrugated paper roofing material from Chris Bond at Full Scale Models. Great stuff. I've used it on a lot of projects. A lot of projects here on the Thunderbird layout. And I like to cut it into three foot wide strips. Scale three foot wide strips, which is prototypical. And overhang the edge of the roof by about three to six scale inches there, depending. I'll show you what those strips look like right out of the package before you cut them up. And the cool thing is there's different rust patterns on different sheets. So it's really easy to get a nice variety and it looks just, it just looks great on the model when it's finished. I'm using some very lightly diluted Eileen's tacky glue to hold these on. And the effect you get mixing the plain gray with the rusted ones, of course, is that, you know, there are some panels on the roof that have been replaced. On the upper course of panels, same thing. Except I'm cutting them into four foot lengths, have it overlap right there. And then when I get to the roof vent, I need to trim the piece to fit around that. So I'll just cut that piece out. All right, that's pretty seamless. Make sure it still comes off. And to finish off the peak of the roof, I cut some strips of corrugation, which are a little under a scale foot wide and fold those over and some glue on the underside. And it has a nice finished look to the roof. And now with that done, I'll use my pan pastels in rust colors and a soft brush, blend everything together. So it's a little bit more unified. First color I'm using here is just this sort of dirty brownish gray, and then I'll come back with some more of the rust colors and touch that up here and there. And of course, the same on the other side as well. It's a little bit further of a reach. Then when I'm happy with the way all of this is looking, I'll hit it with a clear matte finish. I still want to do a little bit more weathering, but the final thing I'm going to add today are some signs. I think a good roadside attraction can never have too many signs. So to start off with, I'm adding a sign above each of the tunnel portals that says, what else? Mystery Mine. And on this side, I thought it'd be fun if I had the legs of the sign going right down into the foam. Then I've got a sign to go up here on top of the head frame, the Thunderbird Mining Company. This concrete wall here would be visible from the highway, so I thought this would be a great place for a sign. So I made this. The idea here is this is three sheets of plywood put together to make a sign that's eight by 12 feet. And if you've been out on old Route 66, that probably looks familiar. Here it is. In this case, instead of Jackrabbit, it's Thunderbird. And I framed that in on the back with some three by six. All of these signs were created using a graphics program called Affinity Photo 2. I print these out on my home inkjet printer. Usually, I laminate the printout to something like Bristol board. That's what I did in this case, make it a little bit thicker like plywood. And then I put that clear acrylic spray on there. I'm using my watercolors just to add a little bit of weathering to the sign. Now, all of this is in addition to the big billboard, which is going to be right here. But the final one for today is another plywood sign. It says, And just like the sign says, there it is. The Mystery Mine on the ON18 Thunderbird layout. Thank you all so much for joining me today as I finished up the Mystery Mine. A special thanks to you who made it all the way to the end of this video. I know it was kind of a long one today. In fact, this project ended up taking about two weeks longer than I originally thought that it would. So thanks for sticking around all the way to the end. This is not the end of the Thunderbird layout, though. I've still got a few projects to do on here. The fascia, the Route 66, the billboard. Oh boy, I don't want to start adding them up. I need to get them all done before the end of this month. We'll see if that happens. You can find out by subscribing and hitting that notification bell so YouTube will let you know when the next video is coming from Thunder Mesa Studio. Until that one comes out, you can follow Thunder Mesa for free over on Patreon. That's at Patreon.com slash Thunder Mesa. Or on Instagram at Thunder.Mesa. And check out the resources available on the Thunder Mesa Studio website at ThunderMesa.Studio. As always, a huge thank you to our Patreon members to help to make these projects and these videos possible. Until next time, keep moving forward, everybody. Adios for now.