by Chip Van Gilder

The group met at the Fircrest Recreation Center on February 2, 2017 with 11 attendees. There was at least one new visitor and several regulars were noticeably missing.

The first order of business was to review new products available. Then each person around the table shared their recent and current activities in the hobby. A couple of the samples brought to the meeting are shown in the photos below.

After a brief break, Mike Stepner gave a clinic on how he uses an “air eraser” in his modeling and some of the techniques he uses.

 

Roy Cutler brought several cars that he had remarked for use on his homeboy road. He then documented each car and then tried to make each car slightly different starting with just the simple ON, for Olympic Northern, to developing a logo based loosely on the NP yin-yang design.

 

Hal Smith brought one of the very first MicroTrains models. It was good to see the early work and be able to compare today’s models.

 

Reading the back of the box shows this was probably issued in 1972 and still showed an association with Kadee.

 

The clinic by Mike Stepner was about using an “air eraser”.  Essentially it is a like a sand blaster but uses finer and softer grit materials for erasing unwanted printed on detail from  models in order to personalize them.

The model blaster he used was from Harbor Freight for not a lot of money.  It comes with a blasting compound that is too harsh for the plastic models we have today.  It may be OK for brass material and other metals but not plastic.  Mike uses baking soda (Arm & Hammer is a brand name.)

 

This photo shows the basic materials needed for the air eraser project. The unit hooks up to an air pump and Mike runs his at a fairly high psi, 60 psi if my notes are correct.

 

Mike tapes off areas of his models to only remove certain details. this does leave a dull flat finish that was observed in some of the models but not evident in the photos.

 

A couple of hopper that had all the printed detail removed.

 

This is a model Mike finished using a logo and road name from a friend’s layout. Mike uses this technique to add foreign road cars of other layouts he has operated on.

Here is a link to a short (very short) video of the technique in action.  https://youtu.be/jsGRE83ZjB0

 

The Tacoma N Scalers meet on the First Thursday of the month, year round, at the Fircrest Recreation Center starting at 7 PM.