Wood Weathering Techniques

I was looking quickly through back issues, and I think this is the first "Layout Tour" in MRH to date, am I correct?  A very well done piece in my opinion and the large number of photos made this superior to the typical article you see in the print magazines.

I was most impressed with the bleached look of the Utility and sand cars.  Can any techniques be shared for guys like me who are looking create a similar look?

Thanks,

~rb

Not quite the first...

I think Tom Wilson's Little Colorado (an indoor Fn3 layout) in the first issue had that honor.

Layout tours...

The following layout tours have appeared so far...

• Tom Miller's (not Wilson) Fn3 Little Colorado - Issue #1
• no tour in Issue #2
• Jack Burgess' HO scale Yosemite Valley - Issue #3
• Ed Loizeaux's S scale New York Central - Issue #4
• Dick Grinyer's On3 Stony Creek - Issue #5

and coming real soon now...

• George Sellios' HO scale Franklin and South Manchester - Issue #6
• Craig Bisgeier's HO scale Housatonic Railroad - Issue #6 (yes, two in the same issue)

Perhaps the difference is up until Dick Grinyer's layout tour, the layout coverage has been in the form of an interview with the layout owner?

Best regards,

Charlie (I'm a layout touring fool) Comstock

Layout tours

 Charlie,

Tell Horace to get some sleep...VBG

George's and Craig's layout should be in Issue # 6 and not 5...right?

[Charlie: Sigh, yes they should - I fixed it - but aren't you up later than me? Quebec vs Oregon?]

Nota Bene

Good point Charlie.  That must have been what caught my attention this time.  The format was closer to a traditional presentation of a layout as opposed to the format used previosuly.  That, or I am asleep at the wheel...

FolioLT-Bold?

Maybe a bug maybe not, when I was reading this article using the embeded edition on windows xp I encountered a popup dialog on page 70 requesting the font FolioLT-Bold, after doing a google search it appears this single font would cost me around $29 to download.  Anyone know of a free version of it?  If there are no free versions, can future versions of articles be done with only standard fonts or ones that are freely available?

Btw, great article and layout

Mike

Something is very wrong. You

Something is very wrong. You shouldn't need to buy these fonts!

We'll look into it.

Charlie

Not Wilson

It was Tom Miller's Little Colorado in Fn3.

I prefer layout articles that focus on 'what's different about this one' and 'what problems I solved to build it this way.'

We need more turntable articles.

Font dialog

Yes, I had that happen last night on page 70 too.  Oddly enough, while I got the missing font message everything seemed to display just fine.

I checked out the mag in the beta edition, standard, & embedded

editions.  As I went through each version, I got that same message, but everything loaded fine.  I just clicked off the pop up.  I could not see anywhere that I was missing anything.

Missing font message is an Adobe bug

The Adobe software we're using to produce the magazine is supposed to embed the fonts in the document so you never get a "missing fonts" message. That's an option we turn on in all our PDFs we produce, for obvious reasons. The chances everyone will have all the fonts we're using also on their machines is nil, so we tell the Adobe software to embed all the fonts.

If some of you are seeing a message complaining about missing fonts, then Adobe's software isn't doing what we told it to do or the reader has a bug, one of the two.

Adobe bug

I think it must be a bug in the software because the fonts do seem to be embedded in the document since it displays everything just fine.

It's nothing anybody should get excited about.  Close the dialog box and read on. :o)

A Sight to Behold

While I know that I would never be able to accomplish in a lifetime what Dick Grinyer has accomplished here, I was thrilled to see it in such vivid expression and vitality. There is so much packed into such a small space! Thanks MRH for featuring such a fine railroad by a self-evidently fantastic modeler.

I would add that layout tours are my favourite part of the magazine and something I look forward to each time a new magazine comes out. (And I'm stoked for George Selios' model railroad tour in the upcoming issue). Keep up the great work and a blue ribbon to Mr. Grinyer for a job well done on both the layout and the article/photographs! 

3-D Pan-O-Rama

 I just found out about MRH at the NMRA 75th anniversary convention in Milwaukee. I've downloaded all nine issues extant and I'm becoming more and more impressed as I work my way through them.

I'm reading them in full-screen mode using Adobe Reader 9.4.0 and the 3-D Pan-O-rama feature didn't seem to be working when I clicked on the images as directed.

However, by pressing the ESC key, the view dropped out to a regular window, and that window displayed a yellow header with a message saying some features were disabled by the Adobe Reader (as a security protection feature). 

After exercising the Option to enable those features, the 3-D Pan-O-rama worked correctly.
 

Full screen has become a problem

Yes, thanks to Adobe, full screen reading has become a problem. It used to be when you clicked on various media they'd provide a dialog box popup alerting you to the issue. When they changed that in the latest release to the yellow notification as a ribbon below the toolbar, that made the alert disappear when in full screen mode.

Pretty dumb if you ask us. So now we do NOT recommend using full screen mode and we've moved away from making that the default with our magazine.

You Gotta Love Adobe...or not!

There they go shooting themselves in the foot again.  Is it just me or does Adobe seem to often take one step forward to go two steps back?

Shaking my head in bewilderment...

Shooting Oneself in the Foot.

Welcome to the world of American style business decisions of late. Adobe isn't the only one doing it nor will they be the last company doing it. You really have to wonder how the could have stayed in business making decisions like this, but this isn't a new phenomenon.

American business has been in the toilet since the 1960s when those who started mnay businesses retired or died and the business passed on to the kids or outsiders because the widow/kids didn't want to be bothered. I can give you awhole list of companies that either got acquired or went belly up because of mismanagement or other actions that caused a loss of jobs here and the transfer of those same jobs elsewhere.

Things got worse in the 1980s when Japanese, Chinese and Korean manufacturers began knocking off copies of stuff that used to be manufactured here in the USA and grabbed an appreciable share of the market with no saying boo or evan made any effort to protect copyrights or patents tghat were never respected in the Far East to begin with. So it takes an economic downturn like we had in 2008 foer Congress to even realtize that the economy is in trouble and attempt, they say, to fix it is made. But the attempt is both idiotic and designed to help only the friends of the party in power and to hell with everyone else.

I still have tO ask where they were when American jobs were exported to the Far East in the 1990s? Were they having coffee or sleeping. I'll tell where I suspect the clods that serve in elected positions in this country were. They were getting payoffs from every foreign government that wanted full employment for their own people. Now what form did those payoffs take? It's called "campaign contributions" which have never beeen adequately monitored.

I'll get off the soapbox now as we return to our regularly scheduled broadcasting.

Irv

Well, Irv, don't hold back

Well, Irv, don't hold back ... tell us what you really think.

Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Adobe has a really bad case of "not invented here" - which means they even want to redesign the web itself in their own image.

We use Adobe because the PDF format is everywhere - and it lets us maintain our page look exactly as we designed it. HTML reflows the page based on how big the window is you're viewing it in. HTML is good for mobile devices for that reason. But HTML ruins your carefully built page composition.

So the next best thing is PDF's - which means like it or not you hook your wagon to Adobe. So we have this love-hate relationship with Adobe and their products.

Of PDF's and Adobe

Yes, I really like the capabilities of the PDF file format too and I also like many of Adobe's non-web products.  Until something better comes along Adobe works for me.

Didn't mean to set you off there Irv. [wink]

Besides

How would Adobe ever get a new pair of Shoes if they didn't keep shooting themselves in the foot. only real problem is it trips ups up not them. but it beets going bare foot.

Dan

PS

I wonder how Adobe feels about being the company that caused the whole world economy to collapse must have been a really big Bug

00000000000oooooo........

But I did hold back or,,,

...you might have had to censor an off color remark or two.

I like PDFs because one can send them via the interne and the PDFs can contain almost anything. I've even seen companies use PDF files to send bills to customers. It's heck of alot cheaper and faster than the U. S. Snail.

Irv