This only took one CFL season and three months of off-season

[da1]

Finally finished a little industrial building.  Walthers Midtown Oil.  Started before the CFL season last year, took time off for Edmonton to capture the Grey Cup and picked up again after Christmas.  Thanks to buddy Dennis for his help with the little gooseneck lamps.

 

[hon30critter]

Neat little building. I love LED lighting.

Dave

[richhotrain]

Good looking building.

Why those two spots on the foundation where the siding overlaps?

Rich

[da1]

richhotrain

Why those two spots on the foundation where the siding overlaps?

Those are the tabs holding the walls to the floor.  That will be concealed with gravel and brush when located on the layout.

D

[kasskaboose]

Great work with the building.  Can you pls explain how you did the lighting?

[da1]

kasskaboose

Can you pls explain how you did the lighting?

 

 

My friend Dennis and I bought a couple of the Gooseneck Building Light kits fron Ngineering.  Dennis bent the goosenecks and assembled the first couple as a favour to me [big time thank you!].  I glued them together, painted and mounted these two.  They come stock with 470 ohm resistors, but I found that a little bright.  I put two lights in parallel with a 1.5k resistor on a 12V DC p/s.

 

From here I will need to assemble the remainder myself.  Chatting with Dennis I think there's two challenges: soldering the magnet wire to the SM LEDs, and pushing the pair of magnet wires down the gooseneck bent tube.  Soldering I'm not afraid of, tiny little wires down a very small tube looks like a frustrating experience, though.  Vodka may be involved. 

 

Dwayne A

[hon30critter]

Dwayne:

It will be hard to pour the vodka down the little tube!

I use a pair of positive grip bent tip tweezers to hold the LEDs:

There is an LED in the tweezers in the photograph. I insert the LED so one solder pad is pointing straight up, solder the wire, and then flip the LED over in the tweezers to expose the other pad. If you are using 0603 LEDs it is easy once you have done a few. I only use magnet wire where necessary but obviously it has to be used to make the lamps. For 0402 LEDs I have to admit that I now buy them pre-wired on eBay. I soldered quite a few of the smaller LEDs but the reject rate was pretty high so I decided to take the easy route.  I have the Ngineering goose neck lamp kits although I haven't made any yet. The leads on the pre-wired LEDs go into the tubing quite nicely.

You might want to try using even higher value resistors to get the LED brightness down closer to the light from an incandescent lamp. I have used resistors as high as 30K to get LEDs to glow nicely. That's probably a little high for your purposes but if you want to have the lights so they don't illuminate half the yard then something in the 10K range would be worth trying.

I also use Tamiya's Clear Yellow paint to make the LEDs a little softer in colour, but that depends in some respects to what era you are modeling.

Dave