Walthers DDV works fine. Get some artists matte medium at an art supply store and thin it with Liquitex brand Air Brush Medium. If they don't have Liquitex, Golden will work OK. Go to a shop that specializes in aircraft and military models and get some Tamiya flat overspray, Humbrol, Gunze-Sangyo, and others all make products that are superior to Dullcote. Krylon has a line of artists coatings that work well also. there is a UV resistant clear, a satin, and a matte finish as well.
You cannot find everything you need to build model trains at a train store. Even the best train stores in the country do not have everything you need to get great results. Learn to think "Outside the box." I have to remind myself to do this all the time as I am prone to staying inside the box if I don't watch out. Cheers, Froggy,
First, I must admit that I seldom even flip through MR anymore so maybe I'm way out of touch. The few times someone brings one to the club I've seldom seen much on operations. Maybe i just miss those issues and am speaking out of my butt.
If MR was really about "model railroading", operations would make up a "majority" of articles. If not, then it's safe to say that they cater more to railroad modelers.
Yes, I agree many do both, but from what I have experienced, most ( not all ) of the people that are new to the hobby, say less than 3 to 5 years, are usually building a diorama with trains passing through. Operators are usually ones that have been in the hobby for years and have learned to appreciate "railroading". While many older model railroaders do read MR, i would bet that most do not and only pick one up when someone tells them of a specific article that they might be interested in.
To sum it up, most of the more serious, or more intense model railroaders "that I know", seldom even speak of MR anymore. MR needs the widest possible readership and it seems it's mostly to newer modelers.
While the newer editions of the past few years have really great pictures and is more "fancy" in it's publication, I tend to go through our collection and read articles back from the 60's on up.
Jeff, Horse ownership per capita reached an all time high about 1900 with one in four people owning a horse. That put the horse population in the neighborhood of 2,000,000 head. Today there is about one horse per thirty people or a little over 9,000,000 head. While the blacksmith trade may not be as common as it was a hundred years ago its no where near dead. In fact they are in strong demand and there are more horses to shod than ever before. Bruce
Slight error...... that should be 20,000,000 in 1900. Few people shoe their own horses today. Even if it's just a tossed or loose shoe very few folks will nail it back on themselves. Today with 9,000,000 head around the blacksmith probably has more work has more work than ever as far as shoeing horses goes. In fact most only shoe horses as many of the other aspects of the trade have almost disappeared. Bruce
There's a subtle difference: In the 80s and 90s, MS forced hardware manufacturers to pay them an operating system fee for each machine, whether or not they loaded Windows onto it. Thus, manufactureres sold machines with Windows pre-installed, and consumers did not in fact have much of a choice. I tried several times to negotiate a lower price for a "blank" machine back then, but no retailer ever agreed to lower the price. They had to pay for Windows whether they delivered it to me or not, you see. (Those who like me did make a choice of OS usually selected a multi-tasking DOS such as DR-DOS, and later OS/2 or one of the early open-source Unix work-alikes. If Steve Jobs had been smart enough to invite 3rd party participation in Apple/Mac, we would IMO see a much more competitive OS market today, with benefits for everybody except perhaps Wee-Willie Wallholes' bankbook.)
MS played dirty in other ways, too, such as releasing MS-DOS 6.22, which was fixed to prevent certain 3rd party software from running on it. (Windows3x/9x/ME was actually a DOS with a pretty face.) The Justice Department under Clinton was close to nailing MS for their breach of fair competition rules, but then the administration changed. In Europe, MS was nailed anyhow, because they don't take kindly to market manipulation over there. MS does not meet most people's needs - it is one of the least reliable products ever sold to a mass market. If our cars were as badly designed and as failure prone as Windows, there would be Congressional Committees, Royal Commissions, Commissions of Inquiry and so on all over the world.
MR does regular market research, and adapts as best it can. BTW, print media generally are losing readership and subscription base.
In case you infer some wierd notions of my political/economic ideology. I'm a radical free marketeer, but I don't expect a truly free market anytime soon. In fact, I don't think it's possible to have a free market on a scale much larger than that of a village without forceful government intervention. But that's a discussion for another forum than this one.
In the 19th Century, a blacksmith did a great deal more than shoe horses. He was a tool-maker and complete one-stop metal-working shop. He made farm implements and did a great many other things besides make horse shoes and attach them to horses. Today that is all they do. Nine million horses do not require the number of Smiths that Nineteenth Century society did. The Smith's services have been fragmented and redistributed among a variety of trades ranging from automobile manufacturing to service garages as the motor car has replaced the horse, and the tractor has replaced the mule. Mules no longer pull plows and there are no "farm implements" in the same manner that there were in the Nineteenth and preceding Centuries. You do not have to get your wagon repaired by a Smith or Wainright as the auto repair garage has assumed these functions. And so it goes. Froggy,
I don't know if you'd say disappeared as much as gone into hiding. I know several people that are active in the trade, a few of which try to keep it hidden so they can enjoy what they do and not be flooded with more work than they can handle. Their work isn't cheap, but it never was. The blacksmith was always well paid for what he did, also with good reason.
The railroads had their blacksmith cars, which meant that if something couldn't be brought to him easily, he was able to go to the work site and do the work on the spot, as well equipped as he would have been in a permanent shop.
And I can remember standing in the door of the blacksmith shop watching the power hammer shape hot steel as easily as pounding clay. I've seen tools that were forged from old files, chisels, wrenches, that still compare to the finest available today, and have already lasted much longer. I've also used lathe boring tools that were forged in a blacksmith shop, from high carbon steels, haven't found anything that worked as well since for what they were intended to do.
Some of which may have been lost forever, but probably not.
Try mid-20th century. In Austria, I spent a lot of time watching the smith make everything from wagon wheel tires to hinges for barn doors to wrought iron gates. And of course horse shoes, which he custom fitted. Horses rarely objected to his ministrations - I guess he made comfy shoes for them :-) In those days, kids could hang around a workshop as long as they stayed out of the way and didn't touch anything. I also watched the wagon maker, the shoemaker, the tinsmith, the cabinet maker, and the baker (oh, the smell of fresh-baked bread!)
If your military have cavalry regiments, check on what the blacksmiths do. I helped film a blacksmith in one of the British cavalry regiments some years ago and he did a lot more than just shoe horses. He was supposed to be able to do running repairs on equipment from what they could find in the field and I remember him demonstrating welding metal together with hammer and anvil to make up longer pieces. There was no mechanical help either - all done with hand tools.
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