New Kit & Portable Layout News | Dave's Train Vlog

Hey guys, Dave here at the studio where it is time for another train vlog. I'm here on a very wet and rainy Friday afternoon in October. We are getting a monumental amount of rain here in the southwest this year. Usually the fall is very dry here, you know, Kind of the nicest time of year to visit traditionally, September and October is very dry. but this year, man, we've got rain and flooding and it's, it's just a mess out there. So everybody who's out there in the Southwest, uh, in Arizona and Nevada and Utah, where we're getting all of this rain on top of the floods we've already had, um, Hey, stay safe, stay safe and stay dry. If you can. It's been a couple of weeks since I did a vlog and I wanted to get back into it right away because a lot of people seem to enjoy these and I certainly do enjoy doing them, spending a little time with you guys and showing you around, telling you what's going on here at the Thunder Mesa studio. I took a little time off from them longer than I intended to, but long story short, I've been dealing with a sick dog. And that almost sounds silly to say, you know, it's like a dog ate my homework, but it's the truth. Those of you who maybe follow on social media or Patreon or whatever, you may have seen my posts about my dog Bert, who is a little over 14 years old now, which is pretty near 100 in dog years He's not doing that great. He's got a... A nasty, rare form of doggy cancer. And a lot of you chimed in and, you know, sent your best wishes and your condolences and all that. A lot of you shared stories of pets that you had lost, and that means a lot to me. Thank you so much for doing that. I just wanted to take a minute to thank everybody. I don't want to go in and talk all about my sick dog. It's not a sick dog vlog. It's a train vlog. Though you know, Sick Dog Vlog is a great name for a YouTube channel. A lot of you have kindly asked how Bert is doing. And, you know, he has good days and bad days. Some days he's like on death's door. And other days he seems okay. He eats and poops and sheds and scratches and bites. He does all the things that dogs do. But some days, you know, maybe a couple of days he'll just lay there. Be all kind of listless and not do anything and not even eat. And that's worrisome. And, you know, as his human, as his friend, it's kind of hard to know when is an appropriate time to do the thing. Because there are services that will come to your house and you don't even have to take the dog to the vet. They'll come to you. And so, yeah, we're looking into all that. Anyway, it's been painful and time-consuming and not something you want to spend a lot of time dealing with. But as I said, I did want to thank everybody for their kind words and condolences. And I especially want to send a thank you to Scott Eastburn. Scott. is my collaborator on Thunder Mesa Kits, and he does all of the 3D printing for me. He does, you know, the parts and the exclusive figures that we have with the kits. And he sent me something that he made from a photo that I had posted online. And I'll try and get a better shot of this. But this is Bert in O-scale in 3D printed form. Isn't that sweet? There he is. You can get a little bit better look at him there. I was just cleaning the sprues off of him. He will live on in the Thunder Mesa layout. He sent me, actually, three or four Berts, so he might live in more than one place. You never know. Anyway, Scott, I just wanted to say thank you so much for that. That was incredibly kind and thoughtful. Looking around the workbench here, I can tell you it's cleaner than it was last time, but I've got something on here that I'm working on that I can't show you. It's a top-secret project. Otherwise, I would show it to you. I'm working on a drawing for a friend, and unfortunately, I've been working on it for over a year. Here. As I've said before, I'm terrible at estimating how long things take. I said, yeah, I could probably whip it out in a month, month and a half. I'll have it for you. It's been over a year, and I'm really sorry to the person that I've been working on it for them. This is why I don't take these things on anymore. People ask me all the time to do a graphic for them or a track plan or something like that and I almost always say no because I know myself and I know that I won't necessarily be able to finish it in a timely manner. So thanks for understanding and sorry I can't show it to you. It's really cool but as has often been said all of my best work is is under NDA. No, what I really wanted to talk about today was the new structure kit on its way from Thunder Mesa Kits and I'll throw some pictures up here on the screen so you can take a look. This is the pilot model that I've been working on. If you've been following these vlogs you've probably seen it in the background. I've talked about it a little bit but now I'm ready to actually show it to you and share it with the world and they're not for sale yet. I am taking pre-orders on my website from my Patreon members. As Patreon members, they always get a first stab at these things. They get first choice, first chance to own. Anyway, but they'll be available to everybody else out there who wants one. Well, not everybody. They are made in limited numbers. They'll be available to order in November, coming up real soon. It's, as I record this, it is the end of October. Where did it go? That's a question you ask yourself more and more as you get older. What day is it and where did the time go? Anyway, this is the Latigo Mining Company office based on the Lago Mining Company office from the Clint Eastwood film High Plains Drifter. And there's a great character that comes with the kid. It comes with two characters. And also some interior furnishings, because this structure has a detailed interior. It's got a potbelly stove and a roll-top desk and a safe, which is open. And there's money and coins and a big gold nugget in there, which is really cool. Fun to paint. And it comes with a figure, a clerk who sits at the desk. And it comes with... A guy named Mr. Drake, who is based on Dave Drake from the movie High Plains Drifter. He's kind of a weasel in the movie, but in the story of the Latigo Mining Company, I have promoted him to more of an evil mastermind. I mean, every good Western has to have a villain, right? So Mr. Drake is kind of growing into the villain of the Latigo story. He not only is a part owner and general manager of the Latigo mining company, obviously he's got some shadowy partners back east with money, but he's the one that takes care of things on site in Latigo. And he's not a guy you want to mess with. He's got some hired guns working for him. By the way, if you choose to purchase the Companion Pack from Characters Count Miniatures along with the Mining Company Office Kit, you'll get some of those gunmen. They're pretty cool looking. Anyway, so he's got his fingers in everything in town, you know, like a good 19th century entrepreneur. Not only is he part owner and general manager of the mining company, But he's got his fingers into some of the saloons in towns, gambling, liquor, ladies of the evening, for lack of a better term. And yeah, he's kind of the boss of town. He's the kind of guy, he's not the sheriff, he's not the mayor, but the sheriff and the mayor both worked for him so. Mr. Drake, he's kind of the bad guy in Latigo, and I decided to have him standing out on the front porch Surveying his domain and so those limited kits are in production now And they will be available to order on the website very very soon. So keep an eye out for that. That's Thunder Mesa kits Come this little display table here is the other thing I wanted to talk about today I've got the first two kits from Thunder Mesa Kits up here, but actually not the table itself. This is a folding trade show table. It's a bar height table, so higher than those folding tables you can get at Costco, Walmart, places like that. This is more heavy duty. It's got metal legs that fold up inside of it, and this is going to be the base for my dead rail layout. that I've teased you guys with a little bit. This is going to be the base for what I'm calling the Rolling Thunder layout. So the Rolling Thunder layout is going to be three by six feet. It's kind of a mini layout, you know, small enough to fit in the back of my van. And the plan is to use this little portable table, the legs fold up inside of it. I'm going to remove the melamine top off of it and bolt the bench work directly to the steel frame and the legs. So the legs will fold up inside and we'll be able to just check it in the back of the van. Carefully check it, carefully place it in the back of the van and take it to shows and things. And the inspiration for this was, you know, there's that little get together that we have out in Southern California with my friend Gary Beatty and some other fine modelers where we show off our mini layouts and projects that we've been working on over the years. And for the last several years, I've been bringing something new every year. You know, with the kid business and everything, it's kind of gotten difficult for me to create a whole new mini layout in a year. So the plan here is to build this, get the scenery in, get it running. By the way, it is dead rail. We're going to talk more about that and then add a little bit on to it. So it's called the Rolling Thunder. So it's kind of like a miniature version of the Thunder Mesa layout, which rolls, which can go to different places and will grow a little bit every year. New structures and new scenes, things will be added every year rather than trying to do a whole new layout every year. That said, I probably still will, you know, build other mini layouts and things when I can find the time because I really enjoy doing that along with working on Thunder Mesa. Goldfield and Calico and the Barlow Pass, the big layouts, bigger. But, yeah, this one is to fill a specific need. And the other thing is, every time I do a structure for Thunder Mesa kits, I have to build it twice, basically. Once, the pilot model, which is the proof of concept, which you can see behind me there. And the second time I build it, it's for a build video. And I actually take one of the kits out of the production run, just like anybody would get right off the shelf. Nothing special about it. Well, of course, they're all special. But anyway, same kit everybody else would get. And then I put that together to do a build video or a series of build videos on those. And so I end up with two of them. And one of them goes on the new Latigo section, the Thunder Mesa layout. And the other one. is going to go on the Rolling Thunder layout so in that way I can you know take it places and show people hey this is this is what the kits look like so yeah the Rolling Thunder layout 100% dead rail not going to be any power to the rails at all and I'm working with uh Duncan McCray at Tam Valley Depot uh he's helping me out with all the dead rail components and things and uh I'll be doing a series of build videos on the layout. How we wire things for dead rail, or rather how we don't wire things for dead rail, how we hide the batteries in the locomotives, and all that kind of stuff. So I'm going to be working on this between now, the fall, and spring of 2027, with the hopes to have the layout operational and presentable, not finished, those are different things, operational and presentable by the end of April. And now I think we have time for a little Q&A. And these are questions that are sent in to me either through email or in the YouTube comments or in comments on Patreon, places like that. You can send me questions that I will do my best to answer. Thank you, sir. It's thundermacestudio at gmail.com. Let's see. First one here is from Jerry. Do you have a home layout, or do you only have the layouts that we see in the studio? I do not have a home layout. This all started when we moved from our place out in Camp Verde, which is another little town out here in central Arizona. We moved from there to Clarkdale, and there wasn't really room in our new house in Clarkdale for the layout. And at the old place, I had a shed out in the backyard which doubled as my art studio, which is where the layout was, the original Thunder Mesa layout. So I got this harebrained idea that I could rent a space at the Jerome Arts Center, which is just up the hill from where I live in Clarkdale and, you know, have it open to the public because a lot of people wanted to come and see the layout. So that's what I did. I moved it up there and that kind of began the whole tradition, for lack of a better word, of the layouts being at the studio rather than at home. Uh, I really don't work on, uh, model railroad stuff at home. I play music and I do stuff on the computer. I edit video and things like that. But, uh, yeah, there's, I don't have a home layout per se. I don't have one in the basement or the attic or in a spare bedroom. We don't have a spare bedroom bedroom. Uh, but so yeah, everything's here. Long, long answer to your short question, Jerry. Let's see. Albany Eastern fan writes, Have you ever considered doing a small series on building a named passenger train for any of the layouts similar to the Denver and Rio Grande Western's San Juan train? I'm currently working on a pre-war Empire Builder consist using primarily the branch line car kits. As a short line modeler, narrow gauge and short line modeler, especially industrial narrow gauge, mining companies and things like that, it's not something that's really come up a lot. In my thinking, never say never, the tagline for the gold field in Calico is the route of the Mojave Miner. So if I were to do a named passenger train, which would probably be, since the trains are short, coach, combine, combination baggage and passenger car, and a business car, a parlor car, maybe a couple of coaches. They'd probably be short cars too. But if I was going to do them, it would be for the Goldfield and Calico, and it would be the Mojave Miner. And that would be a fun project. That would be a fun creative exercise because you could come up with the color schemes and, you know, what kind of cars are they, who are they built by, yada, yada, yada. So that would be a fun project. You've given me an idea. This is a great question from Studley Yard. Have you ever been swayed by your audience's reaction to a project, either positively wanting to pursue an idea more, or negatively abandoning a project due to lack of interest? Positively, 100%. Yes, I get a lot of great ideas from you guys. Some of the great, you know, like the, just now, the named passenger train. Things I wouldn't necessarily have thought of on my own or maybe didn't put enough thought into it. No man is an island, you know. We all exist in a continuum. And so, yeah, I get a lot of ideas from you guys, and sometimes I'm eager to pursue them. As far as negative comments go, I don't think I've ever abandoned anything because of it. I've never had somebody say, Oh, that's crap. Don't do that. Well, people have said that, but I haven't, like, taken it to heart. My feelings on unsolicited critiques are well known. If someone just, if you don't ask, if you don't ask somebody, hey, what do you think of this? But they tell you anyway, like, they feel that you are entitled to their opinion, regardless of whether you ask for it. And being, you know, in a public forum like this and doing videos, you, you're going to get it. You know, people are going to tell you what they think of your work, good or bad. But have I ever been swayed by it? Really? Really? I mean, if it was true, if somebody said, hey, you did that wrong, I'm going to go back and look at it and say, yeah, you know, I could probably do that better. I would say very, very, very rarely has that ever happened. We'll see what happens. I just don't put a lot of stock into unsolicited critiques. If I didn't ask, or if you didn't ask, you have no obligation. Take those criticisms to heart. If you do ask somebody, hey, what do you think of this? What should I do to improve it? Do you have any ideas to share? That's a different story. So, you know, negative stuff. That said, I get very, very little. I mean, YouTube has a reputation for being a cesspool of negative comments, but that has certainly not been my experience. Ninety-nine percent of the engagement I get on the channel is positive, and that's amazing. And the ones that are not that great, they're expressing their own problem. That's their problem. Lance King writes, Thanks for answering my question about dead rail. Could you provide a list of items ahead of time we would need, including the locomotive, to do ours as we watch you do yours? Perhaps Tan Valley Depot could offer a Thunder Mesa Trains package deal for the occasion. That's something I could suggest to Duncan. Yeah, that's not a bad idea. I don't know if we have enough lead time. this to put that together, but you know there will be a list of materials with the video at the very least. At the very least they'll say this is the stuff because you can watch the video anytime. You don't have to watch it right when it comes out. You can get the stuff and then go back and watch it and put it together. So I'll talk to Duncan McRae about that and see what he says. Good suggestion. Twigs wants to know what is the ideal distance between axles on On18 flat cars I 3D printed some custom dump cars, and we used two axles for them, and then four axles for some passenger cars. 30 inches. Pulled that right out. On the On18 cars I have, I would say, I don't know if there's an ideal distance. It depends on the size of the wheels you're using. If you're using, like, HOn3 wheels, go wheel sets, which is a good choice for On18. You have to narrow them down for On18, because HOn3 is a little too wide. But the wheels are a good size. I would go with the distance on those trucks, which at O scale is probably going to be 24 to 30 inches, which is kind of a wild-ass guess, but I think that's pretty close. Just look at some Grant Line HOn3 trucks or any HOn3 trucks in the large part and check out the distance there and then convert that to O scale, and that's going to be a good enough answer. Benjamin Trains asks, do you have any recommendations on what stain color to use for the turntable? He's building the Sierra Gallos turntable, asked me about it last time. Are we using oxide rattle can like you do? I'm also using SP Narrow Gauge Laws Gallows turntable as an inspiration and reference for this build. Yeah, the Laws turntable today is painted red oxide, historically as well, because that was the cheapest paint color. You can't go wrong with red oxide, just about everything. Let's paint barns, boxcars, you know, railroad structures and equipment like a turntable. Yeah, a good rattle can paint. By the way, this is advice for O-scale. The paint granules in rattle can might be a little too big for if you're modeling HO or N-scale. But for O-scale, I use them all the time. I get away with murder with rattle cans. And yeah, a good Rust-Oleum red oxide is a great color. However, that said, I would stain all the wood first. I would stain all the wood with a silvery gray stain and then paint it and then scrape away some of the paint to give it a little wear and tear or use a chipper, a chipping agent, something on there so you can peel the paint off. And, yeah, you're going to have a good-looking turntable if you do it that way. Here's a couple of questions that came in over the email. Apparently, they went to my website, Thunder Mesa Kits, and they saw that the Gold Tooth Mine kits are sold out. And Lori Gorman asks, when will the mine kits be available for purchase? Michael Miller has a similar question. Any idea when the Gold Tooth Mine Kit will come back in stock? I've got some bad news for you guys. The answer to that question is never. As is plainly stated on the website and as I've repeated on these videos and social media and builds and everything else, the kits are limited edition. And that's not to create some sort of BS, artificial scarcity, and drive prices up. It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the amount of time I have available to spend on these. So I set aside three months for each kit, okay? So that's the kit run. You've got three months to fill the orders, to make these, to produce the kits. And then at the end of that time, we pull the plug and we don't make them anymore. And that's because we're moving on to the next thing. I'm trying something different in my kit business. I'm not, I don't want to keep stock. I don't want to have a bunch of, I don't want to have to keep making stuff that I designed a year ago or two years ago or five years ago. And that's because time is limited. So we make them for three months and we sell them. And I try so hard to let everyone know when they're available. Now, I hate for my videos to sound like a commercial, because that's not what I'm here, that's not what I'm about, that's not what I'm here for, but, you know, I try to let everybody know this is when they're available, this is when you can get them, this is for how long you can get them, and I put it on socials, and I put it on YouTube, and I, you know, I put it on Patreon, and everywhere else. I get to hire an airplane and sky ride it, it doesn't matter. There's still going to be a few people that say, hey, I missed out on that mine kit. Are you going to rerun them? And I'm sorry. No, we make a limited number, usually 150 or something like that, because that's about what the market will bear. And that's about how many I can get done in that amount of time, in that quarter. So every quarter, a new kit comes out. Right now, it's the mining company office. If you want one of those. When they become available, keep your ears open, they will be available soon, you're going to want to order one of those. Because when they're gone, yeah, they're gone. Andrew M. Johnson says, I have an idea for a pizza box layout. Do you have any pizza layouts in the planning stages? No, I don't. I have the Rolling Thunder layout, but that's quite a bit bigger than the pizza box layout. The closest thing I did to a pizza box style layout would have been the Rainbow Peak, blanked on the name for a minute, the Rainbow Peak layout, which was about 12 inches in diameter, but that was a paint bucket, paint bucket, pizza box, one's round, the other's square, other than that, it's pretty much the same thing, yeah, micro, micro layout, that's the closest thing I've done to a pizza box layout, and you can see all of the videos on my Patreon, if you go over there, I did a whole series of build videos on that layout, but it's only available as a perk for Patreon members. Tom roll, I'm guessing, wouldn't it be great if kids had a link to an online video showing exactly how they are assembled? That is a great idea, Tom, and that's exactly what I do here on the channel. When I do a new kit, like the Goldtooth mine, there's actually not just one, not just two, there are three videos in that build that takes you from opening the box to finished model. The whole thing from beginning to end. So I do that. It is a great idea, and I'm glad I thought of it. And that is all I've got for this time. Thanks for joining me for the train vlog. And I will see you next time. Keep those questions coming. I love them. I love answering these questions. They always make me think about stuff that maybe I didn't think about before. Until next time, keep moving forward. Adios for now.