At least I hope it deals with scale model railroading (their segment titles can be a bit wonky - the ‘Personal Transporter’ segment was not Starfleet Chief Miles O’Brian discussing tachyon tunneling through supercool hydrogen in the Heisenberg Compensator, but was merely Mini-Vans). Anyway, Discovery Channel viewers, set your DVRs or VCRs to Mar 26, 7:00 pm.
For you unfamiliar with “How It’s Made”, it’s a Canadian program (130+ episodes over 10 seasons) which shows the fabrication/assembly/production of various items in the workshop/factory/mill/plant/quarry etc - something like Modern Marvels, except interesting and informative. Each episode has 4 segments (sometimes the last 2 are related), with funky, cheesy (and yet often catchy) syntherized music in the background, and narration of the process in the foreground (in the US, originally by the soporific Brooks Moore, currently by the equally soporific Zach Fine - the reason for overdubbing from English to…yes, English is so the US audience is not ‘perplexed’ by metric measurements. [banghead]
You will learn something from each segment (OK, perhaps not the toy block one, when they simply ran of things to say about injection molding, and instead talked about the packaging), ranging from products you never heard of (like for me, Opalescent Glass and Orthoses), to processes you didn’t know (like the ductile iron pipe one - didn’t know they sprayed cement on the inside of the pipe…good railfan segment, as they showed unloading of scrap metal from bathtub gondolas via electromagnet crane, and also at the end the shiny (painted) black iron pipes leaving the mill neatly stacked on TTX flats) to just cool processes (like bending straight wire into coiled springs - it’s just cool to see) to the grotesque (the interior of the eyesocket of a middle-age caucasian man in otherwise good health is rather smo
I know that there is a 99.99% chance that it will be toy trains.
It’ll be probably MTH or Lionel, because every hear of Atlas trains running under the tree?
The public thinks if it is a train, it MUST be a model train. Because every I meet asks, “Do have a model trains/ train set/ Lionel?” Considering I have a small variety of models(no-O), but no layout, really they hit the surface. One teacher asked me if I could bring my train collection, and I said “do you want me to bring several thousand dollars worth of equipment?” Everyone, I must say, was very astonished!
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what it is - although they have done some model stuff before, it tended toward miniature houses and (just recently) miniature silver sets - however, they did do nice segments on Model Ships (season 6), and (also recently) Steam Powered Models (which were neat). I was also trying to think Garden Railroad manufacturers in North America or the UK, as that might well be their focus - nice & big & photogenic - oh well, we’ll see in March.
I watch it all the time, lately it’s been 2 episodes every weekday night at 7:00 est. Now that I’m retired I’ve seen some episodes on during the day . somethimes repeats. Always interesting.
what i always think is kind of neat is that all the stuff made on the show is done in N. america, when it’s products that you’d think would be made overseas.
Gapplegg!!! Dude!!! No daytime TV!!! You gotta get out man and enjoy life. You won’t be able to enjoy your retirement if you start wastin the day watchin TV. Take a road trip. rake the yard, do the dishes. anything but daytime TV. That’ll killyou quicker than anything. Don’t forget to walk at least a mile a day or Bike 4-6 miles. Exercise the heart vigorously. Otherwise we’ll end up writin you off dude. OK,rant over.[:)]
No, it is the retirees that sit on the porch that die.
The rest will live forever enjoying stuff like how it’s made.
That show was rather good, you can even look it up on the internet and watch previous shows.
That’s what VCRs or DVD recorders are for. Record it and watch it when it’s convenient for you.
Its a pretty cool show. According to thier website, That secment was at Weaver Models in Northumberland PA.
The Pennsylvania Cable Network did a nice, in-depth tour of the Weaver Model factory. Injection molding, paintshop, lettering, the works. Ran at least a 1/2 hour.
Their factory tours are always fascinating.
I love the show. The first time I watched it the wife came in and heard only the music and thought it was some cheap porn movie playing. When she saw it wasnt we laughed and watched the rest of the show together. Then I asked her how she knows what a cheap porn movie sounds like. They need more narrating and less music.
I agree. When I was in the 6th grade, I got to go on a tour of the local coal fired power plant. That was really fun. But now I am in the business of building plants, so its not so fun anymore 
Although I would like to know what they do to our gas when they get it in the cryo plant at the next stop down the pipe…
I think it’s an OK show but sometime a bit to simple. But the killer for me was when they started narrating it in Swedish. It really sucks since a lot of the thing get translated wrong and you can hear and understand what they where meant to be saying. It totally ruins the show for me. Same thing with “deadliest catch”, excellent series and then they started narrating it in Swedish. That is plain terrible. So now I cancelled my discovery and got a history channel instead. I just can’t stand listening to narrating that isn’t in the original language.
Magnus
As I figured. 1/48th - O Scale.
There is another show on Discovery channel, its all about trains. The guy in it is English and a lot ofthe show shows Europeon stuff but they also show north American, last week it was on the transcontiental railways in the US. There was a long picture of a challenger running with a passenger train. It was a railfan trip but had some excellent shots. Also some narrow gauge.
Dave
That’s great then, as Weaver makes some nice looking models (don’t know how they track & ride because that’s not my scale, but the ones in the hobby shop & in MR ads I’ve seen look good). First get the Science/Discovery geeks to see nice looking realistic scale models (and how they’re made, of course) and pique their interest, then we can worry about the different scales (as opposed to H-I-M showing production of, say, Annie, Clarabel, and the Troublesome Trucks…)