Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 2:04PM This is an O scale flag stop built by Ben Streeter. This model will be available for the next couple of weeks on our “freebies” page. enjoy.
Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 9:27AM Hi everyone. This is Dave. Thom and I just got back late Monday night and now that we have recouperated a bit, I wanted to give you all some brief highlights. There will be more, with pictures, once I unpack completely. (and find my camera)
First, it was a grueling drive. We knew it would be long, but the weather was really difficult. We arrived Late Thursday, rested and got to the Eastern States Exposition Center early Friday for setup.
All I can say is WOW. This is a huge place and it was already was full of folks setting up some huge layouts in everything from Z to G.
Because we only brought our new HOn30 layout (complete with cardstock trains) and our DVD’s to sell, we were set up in about an hour. We go to spend the rest of the day wandering around meeting some really nice people and seeing allot of great verdors and displays.
This place is absolutely the biggest show I have ever seen. It’s 347,000 square feet under roof, in four buildings. We were honored to be placed in the center of the main building, sandwiched between Scotty Mason of the Scotty Mason Show and Dave Frary, “Mr. Scenery”. This was a great place to be and I want to thank the show management for such a great location.
One of the interesting things to me, was that besides about 25 vendors that we run into at all the shows we go to, the other 375, (yes, there was 400 vendors there), were all new folks to us. It was also a very new customer base to us.
When the show opened on Saturday at 9:00 AM, it was pretty much non-stop people till closing at 5:00 PM. I have never seen such a crowd. The Management reported that the first day attendance was over 11,000. WOW! I missed the 2nd day report, but it was every bit as busy as the 1st day.
Well, I wanted to keep this fairly short and we will have more in a following post, but for now, you really want to see this show. Lots of top notch layouts, modeling, vendors and folks like you. It’s every year at the end of January. Go to the Amherst Railway Society website, http://www.amherstrail.org/, for more info.
Dave Miecznikowski
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 10:37AM I have to admit it, I’m excited. springfield is just 4 days away and even the idea of 16 hours in a car with my brother can’t dampen my mood. i just love going to train shows and going to the biggest one in the country is great. i hope i get a chance to see some of it.
the disks are burned and packed, the layout is running (still needs work but I think it will show well) All I need to do now is pack some cloths and find my fez.
On a completely unrelated note: Consider it a tip of the month.
I use a lot of dull coat. In an effort to save a bit of coin I bought a large can of Krylon matt uv resistant spray. now i know that this can happen with any clear coat but this was particularly bad. I had just sprayed a big commissioned job. hundreds of hours of work and watched in horror as it it turned a foggy white as it dried. OK don’t panic, I’ve seen this before. i remembered that a second spray will some times correct the problem. I did that after the model was good and dry from the first spray. the improvement was very good but not perfect. i wanted to try to understand what was happening so I ran a test bu spraying some art work in my scrap pile. Again it turned milky white. I did a strip test across the face of the art. one strip was one respray. Another strip was two sprays and the last strip was sprayed over with Testors dull coat. each strip sprayed showed improvement but I have to say the Testors worked far better, both clearing up the fog and leaving a nice surface. So I’m endorsing it. Testors works best.
Hope to see lots of you at the show
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 6:55PM Ben’s tutorial is now available in the freebies section, here are some teasers of this excelent tutorial.
