There has been a bit of buzz around lately over this model train car. It's a laser cut kit offered by Minuteman Scale Models and is designed to hold your iPhone or iTouch. The phone sits on its side at a slight angle and through the use of an adjustable mirror, the camera on the phone is able to shoot forward track level POV movies. I was skeptical of this car until I saw a movie posted by one of the modular railroaders of the last Capitol Free-mo setup.
The kit is reasonably priced at $29.95 and includes trucks and couplers. It was easy to build following the directions. You need to take some care getting the orientation of a few of the parts right, and you need to seal the wood parts prior to assembly to mitigate warping, but otherwise it's pretty fast and straightforward. Outside spraying the parts, the build took about an hour or so. I used plenty of small spring clamps to hold things together. After leaving overnight to dry I screwed in the couplers, trucks, and mirror assembly.
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| Spraying the Parts with a clear coat |
A test run produced a nice movie, but I needed to clean the tracks a little better. I'll shoot some more tomorrow and if I have time I'll edit the movie and post on my Youtube page. One thing with editing - because you are shooting through a mirror you need to invert the image. I use a Mac and iMovie, which has an easy fix for this, but you probably would want to check your movie editor first to see if you can do this, or just put up with everything being backwards.
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| Finished Car |
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