Category: Special Projects

Recreating the Big Thunder “Blasting Ahead” Sign

 

Join me as I recreate a trackside sign from Big Thunder Mountain at Disneyland in 1:1 scale! Disney fans will recognize this one from near the dynamite chomping goat as you crest the second lift hill. I use some basic hand tools and faux-finish painting techniques to recreate this prop from the park for the walls of Thunder Mesa Studio.

Thanks for watching!
Dave

On30 Excursion Cars for Gruesome Gulch – GGRR Part 3

 

My Gruesome Gulch mini-layout will need a train of excursion cars for victims - er - guests to ride those haunted rails. In this episode, I build the first car for my ghost train: a 19' excursion coach that utilizes laser cut parts and bits and pieces from a classic HO Roundhouse kit. More to come!

Thanks for watching, amigos! Dave

A Newspaper Office for Gruesome Gulch – GGRR Part 2

 

I know that the structures for my haunted Gruesome Gulch project railroad will probably take longer than anything else, so in this build video, I get a head start on them with the Gruesome Gulch Epitaph newspaper office. Designing and building this small structure helped me get a handle on the esthetics and feel of the entire layout - even before any track was laid! I get to pull out all the stops on this one, really pushing the caricatured architecture and then weathering things to look right at home in a ghost town!

Thanks for watching, amigos!
Dave

Welcome to Gruesome Gulch

 

New project! Join me as I kick off a new, small, portable On30 layout project with a haunted ghost town theme! The Gruesome Gulch Railroad is a pure flight of fancy, where ghost trains travel from an abandoned western mining town to the haunted underworld realm of Cadaver Caverns. I was inspired to build a small themed layout of my own after visiting some amazing mini-layouts built by friends. I’m a huge fan of spooky season, so I’ve set myself the goal of finishing most of this by Halloween this year! That means I’ll be dividing my time between this project and the Thunder Mesa layout over the next few months. Should be fun!

Thanks for watching, amigos!
Dave

Making a One-Off Sci-Fi Rocket Kit

 

Taking a short break from working on the railroad to make a one-off rocket model kit as a Christmas gift for my son. From initial design, to a prototype build, to boxing it all up as a finished product, follow along as a I put it all together – including mistakes made and lessons learned along the way.

Thanks for watching, amigos!
Dave

Building a Southwestern Trading Post in O Scale

Yá’át’ééh! That’s a traditional Navajo greeting, and appropriate since today’s video is all about building an O scale roadside trading post like those found along old Route 66 on the Navajo Nation. In this stand-alone project, I wanted to try something from a different era than my usual modeling on the Thunder Mesa layout. Some of the modeling techniques covered in this build include:
• Creating realistic aged adobe and stucco finishes
• Old weathered paint on doors and windows
• Watercolor weathering on Illustration board walls
• LED interior lighting • Do-it-yourself corrugated metal roofing
• Realistic tarpaper roofing
• Modeling flagstone surfaces
• Signs, paper posters and more

Thanks for watching, amigos!
Dave

Walt Disney’s Carolwood Barn in HO Scale

 

Welcome to this special preview of Walt Disney's Carolwood Barn in HO scale! This kit has been over 2 years in the making and Jake Johnson and I are excited to finally share it with the world. Crescent Creek Models produced an O scale version of this kit in 2019 for the 20th anniversary of Walt's Barn at Griffith Park and folks have been asking for an HO scale version ever since! Kits go on sale July 17th, 2021 - just in time for Disneyland's 66th birthday. https://thundermesa.studio/product/walt-disneys-carolwood-barn-ho-scale/

Thanks for watching, amigos!
Dave

Dave Builds the Last Chance Gas kit in HO Scale

Join me for a step-by-step build of Crescent Creek Models HO scale Last Chance Gas kit! I helped to develop this kit with my business partner Jake Johnson, and we’re both really proud of how it came out. The kit is based on a 1930s era Conoco station from Peñasco, New Mexico, but could easily represent a rural gas station anywhere along the highways and backroads America.

Last Chance Gas in HO scale: https://thundermesa.studio/product/last-chance-gas-ho-scale/
Last Chance Gas in S scale: https://thundermesa.studio/product/last-chance-gas-s-scale/

Thanks for tuning in, amigos!
Dave

Building a Miniature Trebuchet

And now for something completely different! Join me as I venture beyond the world of Thunder Mesa in this first of a series of new maker videos that exploring other genres and creative pursuits that catch my fancy. For this first project, I'm building a Medieval trebuchet! These massive 12th century siege engines were the super weapons of their day, and I had a complete blast building this one in 1/4" scale. Watch over my shoulder as I hit the workbench and describe the build step-by-step from start to finish.

Thanks for tuning in, amigos!
Dave

Anatomy of a Trebuchet

Planning the Bandit Canyon Ry.

An Adventure in 1:32 Scale Modeling

After a visit from Scott Carter and his wonderful Cinnamon Creek Mining Co. layout, I became inspired to build a small, portable layout of my own. Wanting to do something a bit different from the TMMC and other modeling I had done, and following a correspondence with another fine modeler, William Dickman, who introduced my to the idea of 1:32 scale industrial narrow gauge, I landed on the idea of an outlaw trail themed mining layout in 3/8n20. In truth, the idea for something called "Bandit Canyon Railway" had been gestating in the back of my brain for a couple of years and it just needed a little push to get it started.

1:32 Scale + HO Gauge = 3/8n20

Most readers may not be familiar with the scale/gauge combination of 3/8n20, it is certainly not a common modeling scale, even to die-hard narrow gauge modelers. 1:32 scale is common enough, and is quite popular with large scale modelers to represent standard gauge trains on 45mm gauge track. It's also a common scale for model airplanes, die-cast cars and tractors, and some ship models. 1:32 scale is 3/8"=1', so it's right there in between O scale at 1:48, and F scale at 1:20.3 (there's really no such thing as "G scale," by the way, there's 1:32, 1:24, 1:22, 1:20.3, and others all running on 45mm track to represent different gauges!).

In 1:32 scale, HO gauge measures out to about 20" between the rails. This means that one can use HO and On30 mechanisms, wheel-sets, and chassis as a starting point for some quaint and chunky industrial narrow gauge equipment in what amounts to 3/8n20. This scale/gauge combination is rare enough that it doesn't even have a letter designation like O, HO, S, or N. If anyone ever asked me, I might suggest "Q" for 1:32 scale trains and that would make this project Qn20. The Q stands for "quirky." But I'll leave it up to the NMRA to sort out the alphabet soup.

 

Building a Planning Model

Since the BCRy is to be a portable layout, there were a few problems I needed to work out before starting actual construction. Specifically, I wanted to see how my plan for having the layout travel inside its own stand/base would work out in practice. The solution was to build a 1:8 scale planning model. As a bonus I could work out the sight-lines, color scheme and other aspects of the scenic treatment at the same time.

Using my track plan at the top of this page as a guide, I constructed the planning model from 1/16" thick cardstock and extruded polystyrene foam. The finished layout will measure 35" wide, 60" long, and 44" high with the backdrop. For travel, it will nestle securely down inside the slightly larger base, and the entire set-up will stand nearly 8' tall when assembled. The roof above the layout will house lighting, and doubles as a lid when everything is boxed up. The whole thing will roll around on swiveling castors.

Scenery was sculpted from EPF in a similar manner as the rockwork on the Thunder Mesa layout. Building the planning model gave me a chance to work out sight-lines, like views of the town of Hole in the Wall through the natural arch. The rockwork is based on formations near Bluff, Utah.

 

A 3/8n20 Locomotive

The next thing needed as proof of concept was an actual 3/8n20 locomotive to pull trains around the planned layout. Starting with an On30 Bachmann Porter, I quickly put together a new cab and stack to see how the proportions would work out.

The cab was knocked together from illustration board and wood scraps from my scrap-box, and the stack is some plastic tubing joined to castings from an old MDC-Roundhouse HO kit. Nothing too fancy or detailed yet, but enough to give a feel for the proportions of a finished 3/8n20 mining engine. The last photo shows a size comparison between the 3/8n20 Porter and an unmodified On30 Porter. All in all, I'm very pleased with the chunky and narrow look and can easily see it fully detailed, weathered, and pulling a string of mining gons. One question left to answer now is how to control the trains. Standard DC, digital DCC, or some form of Dead Rail battery power?  Another is, what kind of track to use - Peco On3o, Micro Trains, or hand laid? Dead Rail would mean fairly trouble free operations, and hand laid track would look fantastic on a small layout like this. Stay tuned for further developments from Bandit Canyon country to see where this adventure leads!

Thanks for checking in, amigos. Adios for now!