Although having never meant Mr Freytag . I was floored by his modeling endeavors. He could take the simplest junk laying around & turn it into a believable detail. His modeling inspired me and many others into modeling steel.
Toy parts, punched circles, scrap shapes and the list goes on. His scrap yard scene with the light blue scrap baler was a prime example. Anyone know where it resides now ? I know large objects of his layout was sold years ago. To a select few.
Just a huge fan of his work and try to mimic his modeling.
Freytag’s Cyclopedia of Industrial Modeling shows many of his projects and techniques, but to get the full flavor you really had to hear Dean in action at one of his NMRA clinics (particularly before he was getting easily fatigued). He’d show a rather simple model and then show the super detailed version – very impressive – and then reveal that the “super detail” was, as you say, just a few punched circles of styrene cemented on, and maybe a tiny bit of Plastruct H section. And that was the super detail. It was like a magic trick. And the audience reaction was to laugh because your mind had been fooled. (But make no mistake, he could truly superdetail with the best of them - it’s just that he understood as few did or do that the eye takes in some complexity of shapes and conveys to the brain that it means a great deal of effort was involved.)