I've got some old brass engines that I am going to re-motor, put in DCC and paint. They all have clear jewels glued into the headlight castings. I want to put in LEDs. All attempts to remove them have proved futile. Any suggestions about removing them? All I can say is that some 1960's glues have some serious staying power!
it might be epoxy try a bit of heat , but keep it low so as not to melt solder.
Some of those jewels may have been soldered in. They usually had brass plating on the inner side. I would try heating it gently. Heat will loosen most glues and will melt the solder if it is attached that way. Place a little ball of damp tissue where the headlight casting meets the bracket or boiler to avoid melting that joint.
Only an hour-or-so ago, I popped out several jewel-headlights using the tip of a well-used #11 blade. Some seemed to have been done with contact cement and some with epoxy. However, the suggestion of using heat is a good one if you can't otherwise remove them.
Wayne
Heat from a soldering iron should work even if (or maybe I should say, particularly if) they were fastened with Walthers "Goo" which was so popular back in the jewel headlight era.
Dave Nelson
Can you add headlights to a brass locomotive?
How does that work?
Yes.
W&R tended to put headlights in their brass steam locos. My Tenshodo GN S-1's from the sixties came with them, also. But many didn't.
You drill a hole in the headlight and also in the smokebox such that you can pass the wires inside the boiler. Then you just slide it in. I've only ever done it with a grain-of-wheat bulb. The ones I used had a lens on the end, so it actually sent a beam of light down the track, illuminating the wall of the layout room nicely.
The cool kids now stick one of those microscopic LED's inside a hole drilled in the back of something like an MV lens. Haven't done that. You still have to get the wires out, same as above.
Ed
Well, if the headlight is a solid casting, you use a drill bit in your pin vise and slowly drill out the back of the headlight so you can feed wires to the bulb/LED. Some headlights were already this way from the factory. However many were not. Back in the golden years of steam, headlights were only used at night. So running with just a jewel that wasnt lighted in the daylight was prototypical to a degree. That, and most bulbs back then were to large and stuck out the front or rear of the light. A few models even came with grain of wheat bulbs. Older GEM, Tenshodo and my MB Austin are all factory lighted. I prefer to use bulbs over LED's. They still have that "warm glow" of the early headlights that LED's try to minic but still don't quite pull off IMHO. Mike
Silly NT's, I have Asperger's Syndrome