Dave’s YouTube videos support his clinic “Building Billboards for the Baden, Vogt and DeSmet” which he recently presented at an Gateway Division NMRA monthly meeting. In both the clinic and the videos, Dave describes why he thinks making your own billboards is a good idea, how to retrieve billboard images from the internet and save the images to your personal computer, how to prepare properly sized decals for printing using an ink jet printer, how to scratch-build the support structures from styrene to display the billboard images, and how to build fixtures from Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene to make the whole job easier.
Since there is a small bit of math involved in creating billboards, Dave has created a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that makes calculating the part dimensions easy. The spreadsheet can downloaded at https://www.gatewaynmra.org/documents/dave-ackmann-ho-billboard-worksheet.xlsx.
The episodes of this video series are:
Part 1 – Building Billboards for the Baden, Vogt and DeSmet: Introduction (2:57)
Part 2 – Building Billboards for the Baden, Vogt and DeSmet: Capturing Images (6:14)
Part 3 – Building Billboards for the Baden, Vogt and DeSmet: Making Decals (10:06)
Part 4 – Building Billboards for the Baden, Vogt and DeSmet: Building the Structure (18:12)
Part 5 – Building Billboards for the Baden, Vogt and DeSmet: Making Fixtures (15:05)
Building Billboards for the Baden, Vogt and DeSmet: Introduction (2:57)
This is the first video in a five part series on building billboards for model railroads. Subsequent videos detail how to capture billboard images from the internet, how to make decals, how to build support structures, and how to make fixtures which make building the supporting structures easier.
Building Billboards for the Baden, Vogt and DeSmet: Capturing Images (6:14)
This video describes how images for model train billboards can be captured from the Internet.
Building Billboards for the Baden, Vogt and DeSmet: Making Decals (10:06)
This video describes how to turn images captured from the Internet into decals suitable for model train billboards.
Building Billboards for the Baden, Vogt and DeSmet: Building the Structure (18:12)
This video describes how to build the supporting structure to hold a model train billboard. Styrene is the primary building material.
Building Billboards for the Baden, Vogt and DeSmet: Making Fixtures (15:05)
Earlier videos in this series showed how I build model railroad billboards. My technique makes use of fixtures created with Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene, or UHMW. This video shows how I created these fixtures.
