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Product spotlight: Lighting car interiors
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<p>An update -- the lighting kits arrived today (not bad, Vermont to Florida in 3 days!).</p><p>They're pretty much as advertised. And plenty bright. In fact, Miniatronics includes 3 optional resistors to cut down the amount of light, 1.0K, 3.9K, and 4.7K. I initially thought the 1.0 was about right, but removed it. It's still a bit too bright in very low room lighting, but good in fairly high light. I may try a 500 ohm resistor or so, but there's probably no really good compromise between high and very low light levels.</p><p>As mentioned rather casually in the review on Tony's site, while the lights don't flicker off when power is removed momentarily, they do in fact flicker from bright to dim, fairly noticeably. This is most obvious, of course, in low ambient light. </p><p>I installed these in Walthers Budd passenger cars, so didn't use the pickups included. The Budd cars do pickup from both rails of both trucks, but via contacts between screws on the top of the bolsters and the underside of the car, so it's rather hit-and-miss. Someday, I keep telling myself, I'll put some wiring directly from the trucks to the car body. </p><p>These cars have contacts inside for the Walthers light strips, which cannot be soldered to. I stripped about an inch of insulation off the wires, wrapped them tightly around the contacts and soldered the "knot", then applied super glue to hold them to the contacts. So far, at least, this seems to work better, as they flicker less than the Walthers strips did.</p><p>These are pricey at $22 ($21 each for 5 or more), but do work pretty well. I haven't decided if I'm going to spend the $$ to do the rest of my passenger cars, but am thinking about lighting a caboose or two. </p><p> </p><p> </p>
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