Adam Savage welcomes puppeteer and animator Barnaby Dixon to the cave! We’re big fans of Barnaby’s inventive puppet design and puppeteering style, and he shares a few of his creations and shows how he brings them to life!

We take a field trip the garage and workshop of modelmaker Randy Neubert, who runs VoodooFX. Randy designs lighting and electronic upgrades to off-the-shelf model kits, including a few of our favorite kits we’ve built recently. We chat with Randy about his lighting process and what goes into designing a lighting scheme that’ll look great on camera and on our shelves.

For our final video from the 2018 Summer Steam-Up, we sit down with Accucraft Trains’ President Bing Cheng to talk about his company’s lineup of steam train models and kits. Bing gives us a sense of how these intricate locomotives are developed and the size of the hobby today.

We continue our geek-out over miniature steam locomotives with a look at these scratch-built steam engines by hobbyist Andy Sorenson and his father. We chat with Andy about how these steam locomotives work and the fun of designing their own working model train engines!

We take a field trip to the 2018 Summer Steam-up, an annual gathering of hobbyists who build and operate model trains with working steam engines! Tested meets up with two model train builders who walk us through their gas and coal-powered engines.