Scratch-built portable light tower with LED

[OldSchoolScratchbuilder]

hon30critter

Have you considered how you are going to hide the wires?

 

 

Excellent question and suggestion. I am working on several techniques for permanent lighting points on my three layouts (N, HO and Standard O). In all cases, the layouts sit on pink foam insulation which in turn sit on wood. All of my wiring, lights included, runs down through the insulation and horizontally on the upper surface of the wood with small channels cut in the underside of the foam.

 

For buildings I create flexibility by having a built in LED, and a hole in the foundation that can be placed above an LED mounted permanently in various places on the layout.

 

For mobile units, the wires will be cut short and connect straight down into permanent mini sockets, or run along the layout surface under ground cover to a mobile power unit like this N scale shipping container with a 6 volt battery supply. The container is not modified at all because I use copper foil conductors that slip out of the existing slots in its base.

 

Containers are seen everywhere these days, but other mobile structures can be used to hide batteries too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[hon30critter]

That's neat!

Have you considered how you are going to hide the wires? I have tons of HO scale vehicles to which I have added lights. They all suffer the same problem which is how to deal with the wires coming out of the bottom of the vehicles. In my case the wires are bulky because the resistors are installed in them, and getting a vehicle to sit flat on its wheels is difficult because of the stiffness of the wires.

RR_Mel has a wonderful solution. He attached two brass rods to the bottom of his vehicles and those rods go into brass tubes that are located at various points around his layout. The spacing on all the rods and tubes is identical so he can move vehicles around at will. The tubes barely show if there isn't a vehicle plugged in over them. I hope he reads this post so that he can show some pictures.

In your case the location of the light might be permanent, but it still might be cleaner and easier to use RR_Mel's method. Certainly it would be easy to remove the light if you wanted to work on the scenery.

At some point I'm going to convert all my vehicles to Mel's system. That's going to be a lot of work. I wish I had seen his method before I started to work on the 40 or so vehicles that I have added lights to.

Dave

[OldSchoolScratchbuilder]

cowman

Neat looking little unit.  Now you need a construction site.

Have fun,

Richard

 

They will be used in my quarries.

[cowman]

Neat looking little unit.  Now you need a construction site.

Have fun,

Richard

[OldSchoolScratchbuilder]

My scratch-built miniature portable light tower built with a wood body, fabric snap wheels, staple trailer hitch, wood lamp fixture, miniature LED, and series resistor disguised as a fuel canister.