Lighting Bar Mills Sokol's Furniture and Mattress Company

[ReadingBob]

Bob, the "Sexy Scenes" products from Noch are fairly widely available, but under the counter in the US if you get my drift.  I saw similar products displayed in cases at train shows in Germany a few years ago, including some with animation...

Thanks James.  I'll have to do some research to see what I can come up with.   

[ReadingBob]

Okay, it wasn't part of my original plan but I decided to go ahead and add some exterior lights over the doors.  Thankfully this structure has some awnings over most of the doors which greatly reduced the number of gooseneck type light fixtures that would be needed.  I installed the brackets for the roofs and then drilled holes and slide in some 3mm LED's with the leads bent at a right angle.  When I did this I made sure that I bent the leads for all the LED's in a consistent fashion so I always knew which side was positive and which was negative.


I did need three gooseneck lights to place over the large Sokol's sign.  I'll walk you thru how I make them.  I had a supply of those teeny, tiny surface mount LED's with the leads already attached from the last time I got ambitious enough to do that type of soldering so that step I won't show here.  The leads are very, very fine magnet wire with insulation painted on them.  I start by drilling two very small holes through the lamp shades.  I don't feed the wire through the hole.  I space the two holes out about the width of the LED itself.  The holes I drilled are right next to the neck of the lamp shade. 


After the two holes are drilled into the lampshade I feed the leads for the LED through them from the bottom.


I put a tiny drop of gap filling ACC on the back of the LED prior to pulling the remaining portion of the leads through the lampshade.


Then I seat the LED as close to the center of the lampshade as I can and let the glue take effect.


More in a moment... 

[deemery]

If you're using that thin walled stainless tubing for the 'necks,' Slim told me "there tends to be sharp burrs inside the tubing after you cut it.  Once you fish the wires through and test to see the LED still works, seal the wires in place with CA glue so they won't move and rub against the tubing."


Looks great, and the angled LEDs should provide a lot of light.  I got my goodie box from Slim, so I need to get back to the lighting part of my roundhouse build.


dave

[ReadingBob]

At this point it's worth testing the LED to make sure it still works.


Next I glue the lamp shade to the copper wire that forms the gooseneck with the same ACC.


Now, for the fun part.  I start lining the inside of the wire that forms the gooseneck with the gap filling ACC.  For the next two steps I do just a small section at a time.


Then I use my tweezers to seat the leads up against the wire and wait for the glue to take hold.  I'm simply gluing the leads against the wire.  They're so fine that they're practically invisible after everything is painted.


Side note:  I know that there's hollow tubing available that I can run the leads through and save myself the steps of gluing the leads tot he copper wire.  In fact, I have some (somewhere).  IMHO, however, the tubing tends to look a little out of scale so I prefer this method.

Once all the exterior lights were mounted in the walls I had was then faced with the challenge getting power to them.  A little planning ahead of time would have made this a whole lot easier but I didn't do that.  Since I was working inside the structure it wasn't really feasible to take pictures as I went so I'll just walk you through what I did and show a few photo's of the finished product.

I started by running two strips of copper tape around the inside of the base.  The upper one I designated as the positive line and the lower one the negative.  That gave me bus line to work from.  From there I ran copper tape from the positive line up to a current limiter and then from the current limiter to the first positive lead of the LED I wanted to connect.  Like before I limited each circuit to two or three LED's.  The green squares are pieces of electrical tape.  I used them where I needed to cross the positive and negative tapes over one another so they'd remain isolated.





It was a some what time consuming process but in the end everything worked out pretty well.

More in a moment... 

[ReadingBob]

Thanks for the comments Dave.  As you can see from above I didn't use the hollow tubing but that's a good tip.  I test quite often as I'm going along just to make sure I didn't screw something up.   

Hmm...I seem to have misplaced a photo.  One step I left out was that I painted the LED's I the gooseneck lights with Tamiya Clear Yellow X-24 #81024 to tone them down a little bit.  Those particular LED's produce a very bright, harsh white light.

Here's the finished photo's of the structure all lit up.  P.S. - Don't worry about the front supports being slightly askew,  as I slide the structure around on the workbench I forgot to straighten them out.  I'm sure Tom line them up when he puts this in place on his layout.



You can see the LED's in the goosenecks are still a bit harsh.  I may need to add another coat or two of the clear yellow.






Tom's little people can work all night long now.   

Thanks for following along and for all the great comments, ideas, thoughts, etc.  I know I appreciate all of them and I suspect everyone else does too.   

[deemery]

No light leaks!  That's the hardest thing to get right, in my (limited) experience!


dave

[cuse]

Wow....that's fantastic. Great kit, great build!

[ACL1504]

Bob,

WOWSER, model railroading sure isn't what it used to be. Heck, I'm not what I used to be. I'll never be able to match this one Robert! Beautiful build and lighting!


Wonderful stuff here.

Tom

[jimmillho]

Bob,
With my Electrical background I understand what you did. With my old shaky hands I am not sure I could do it   I will have try it on something that I build.

Jim

[donatode]

Great Stuff !!

[GPdemayo]

Way to go Bob.....the goose necks at the sign are really neat. 

[ReadingBob]

A big thanks to everyone for all the kind comments!  I'm really happy with the way the lighting worked out on this one. 

Dang it.  It's all Slims fault.  He's got me hooked on lighting.   

[donatode]

A big thanks to everyone for all the kind comments!  I'm really happy with the way the lighting worked out on this one. 

Dang it.  It's all Slims fault.  He's got me hooked on lighting.   

He left you hanging on a gooseneck?

[martin.ojaste]

That is a good implementation of LED lighting and wiring (taping). I wouldn't worry about the brightness until it i on the layout/diorama. The inverse squared laws for light applies.

[Slim Jerkins]

Great job Bob!

How do you find the hollow tubing to be out of scale? From your pictures I can't tell much difference.

-slim