Lighted Markers, continued
Installing
Markers
After you finish drilling the markers cut them loose from the sprue and install them on the locomotive. The photo at the right shows one of the markers installed.
The
wires from the LED are going to be fed out the rear facing marker lens and
passed through a small hole in the skyline casing. The photo to the left
shows the small .022” (.5mm) diameter hole that I drilled for the wires to
pass through.
This next picture to the right shows
how the LED fits nicely inside the marker light. For obvious reasons you
should wait to install the LED’s until you have finished with all the painting
on the model.
The picture to the left shows
the LED installation with the wires routed through the hole in the skyline
casing. Use a fine paint brush and paint the wires the same color as the
boiler, or in this case the same color as the skyline casing. As you can
see the wires essentially disappear as they are even hard to spot in this
closeup photo.
After the LED’s have been installed it’s time to test them before you add the lenses. Using a 5 volt power supply with a 1000 ohm series resistor connect up the LED and verify that it lights. You may have to reverse the leads to the power supply if you happen to have the polarity wrong. Don’t use any more than 5 volts for this test as a higher a voltage will damage the LED if it is hooked up backwards. After you figure out the correct polarity label the wires; I used a Sharpie marker and colored one of the wires.
Now it’s time to add the
lenses to the markers. I used MicroScale’s Kristal Klear and carefully filled
in the lens areas using the end of a tooth pick to dab the material in place.
These next pictures show a couple of different views of the lenses just after
I finished applying the Kristal Klear. The Kristal Klear is a white colored
material that dries completely clear, hence its name. As with any liquid
based material it tends to shrink up as it dries. After the material is dry
go back and add some more, keep repeating this until the lens area is completely
filled up. This usually takes about three repeated applications.
Page 2 - Last updated November 13, 2006