Large Scale Central

There's a light at the end of the tunnel . . .

Modeling
#1

Despite all you’ve heard, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

I just finished adding a light to the headlight of EBT #7, my Accucraft C-19 which was back-dated to around 1910.

The primary material is stainless steel hypodermic tubing. (Thanks, Larry.) I found a pack of 5x 3’ lengths of 2mm tubing on Amazon for less than $5. Enough to fix a lot of engines! The tubing replaces the hand rails.

Some of you may remember a thread about how to bend tubing around the front of this loco, which carries the handrail across the smokebox. The best answer (thanks whoever suggested it) was that there would be joints so just use brass rod. When I rummaged through the junk box, I found a piece of copper wire that was almost exactly 2mm, so it was bent and cut to fit. The ends were drilled (with a hand drill) for a 1/32nd rod with a 1/16th tube over it, as the I/D of the hypodermic tube is >1/16th.

The wires come out in the cab and are plugged in to an r/c plug (I re-used a Bind plug,) which is tapped in to the power feed wires on the throttle servo. I wanted to be able to remove the wires through the cab front whenever the cab has to come off to fix the servos. It also makes it easy to turn it off, but I doubt I need to. You can see the 100 ohm resistor that manages current to the LED inside some shrink wrap.

The LED came from a Xmas tree string. When I cut off the ‘fir cone’ I found a lamp-shaped cover over the small, square LED (center.)

The LED was dipped in translucent orange paint (Testors, sold at Michael’s for painting plastic cars.) It was mounted on a piece of black plastic and that was glued to another piece of plastic that fits inside the headlight. Luckily, when I installed the headlight, it was with screws so I could fit a light later.

The reflector behind the LED is a cleaned up ‘furniture glide’ - a small grey disk designed to plug in to a hole in the leg of a chair.

And that’s it. I’m taking it to Jim’s steamup this weekend to get a decent photo, and writing an article for Steam in the Garden magazine with a lot more details.

#2

Nice work!

#3

Hang on Ric - still working on it!

#4

Nice. It’s also possible to use the handrail itself as a ground return, so you only need to run one wire. That’s what I did on my EBT mike (using the same stainless tubing). For those running “modern” steam locos, sometimes the handrails were used as a conduit to run electrical power, sometimes they just ran an extra conduit and in some cases just used bailing wire to attach the conduit to the handrail stanchions! So you needn’t replace your handrails if you don’t want to.

(The headlight is actually a warm white LED that looks much the same color as an incandescent bulb. It just looks blue in the photo due to the white balance of the photo.)

Later,

K

#5

Very cool! I’ll have to look for some of that hypodermic tubing.

Kevin, good tip about using the handrail as the ground.

#6

Very nice work , Pete .

If anyone wants fine brass tubing , there is a company called Trumpeter who make military models .

They market tubing under the name Master Tools . I always keep some handy so that I can aspire to doing stuff like Pete above has done .

Mike

#7

Oh, crap. Now I have another thing to add to my “To Do” list. Nicely done.

:wink:

#8

For those of you working with 1:20.3 Accucraft models, I discovered some small K&S tubing that is the same diameter as the Accucraft handrails at Hobby Lobby. I just removed the original handrails and replaced them with this new K&S tubing and slid in the wires for my headlight on my C-19. Mounted a button battery holder on the front wall of the cab and fed the wiring through the handrail to the headlight. Worked and looks great.

Ross Schlabach