TIE Interceptor 2: Lighting

Second part of this little project to practice painting, weathering, and lighting. It's always a pity to work in the interior of a model detailing and painting it, and when it's finished you cannot see anything. That's why I want to illuminate it.

First I tried with red led, as the original TIE fighters seen in the film, but with a red light you cannot see any of the details:

So finally I decided two install two led: warm white for the cockpit and red in the rear reactor. For that I used two short led strips (3 led length) where I cut the needed things: a resistor, one warm white led and one red led. Cutting them I can use the double sided tape to fix components in the interior. Resistor has been attached under the sit and a small hole drilled in the bottom of the hull, just behind the stand to hide the thin gray wires as much as possible:

Wires are easy to solder at the sides of the smd led and resistor. If you are not sure about the polarity of led, use a tester in the "diode" position to check it first. Try to test the circuit before soldering completely and fix it in place.

White led has been fixed in the top, in front of the pilot. And red led rear the sit:

That's the result (before gluing the hull and the front canopy:

And once fixed, before plaster and painting:

Now details can bee seen from any of the windows!!!

I hope you liked it, using led strips and cutting the necessary components it's straight forward to light a model, and the result deserves the work.

Tie Interceptor 1 - Canopy and cockpit

Some time ago I purchased this old kit from MPC/ERTL. It was released in 1992 and includes 3 small ships from "Return of the Jedi": TIE Interceptor, B-Wing and X-Wing. The quality of the plastic injection is not very good and you have to sand all pieces and use special plastic plaster to fill the slots in the union between pieces. They are "Snap together" kits, easy and fast, and with not much detail that you can work to improve. That's why these models are really good to practice before building the large models that I'll attempt during next months.

My first problem has been with the transparent canopy. I never achieve good results painting the metal frame simulated in transparent parts because they are very difficult to mask. But this time I found a fantastic tip to mask clear parts using what we call in Spain "white glue", that one used in carpentry.

That glue has the property of fixing porous materials, but it doesn't work well in non porous ones. That's why it's a perfect masking fluid for plastic parts.

Here you can see the procedure. Just fill the areas you want to keep clear with the glue. Be generous, don't worry about the quantity:

Wait until it dries, you will see it becomes transparent again, and paint it all:

Glue made a kind of peel very easy to remove, and the final result is just perfect:

Another thing to improve is the pilot. Originally it comes a kind of figure more similar to a radio operator, than a TIE pilot. It has no mask, just a helmet, no tubes... nothing similar to a Dark Force pilot. So I used plaster to make the mask and put the tubes from the mask to the chest's "thing" using thin wire:

I also put some kind of control sticks in the cockpit, because in this model the pilot seems to drive pressing only buttons..... OMG!

I'll show more advances in next posts!!!

Tomix 455 (Ban-etsu West Line) Cab Car DCC with bulbs

Two months ago I found this train in a shop in Barcelona. I imagine they couldn't sell it during some years, because it was abandoned in the depths of a big drawer and the outer card box was not in a perfect state. That's something usual with Japanese models in Spain, nobody wants to buy them, good for me!!!

But my surprise was to find bulbs instead of led in cab cars, and all my experience until now has been just with led. But finally you will see the only difference is the way you calculate the appropriate resistor, all the rest is similar or easier than led cab cars:

You can see here the detail of the components of the board, all of them in one side of the board. There are two diodes (E225) and one switching diode (C5C).

That's the electrical schema of the board. Sorry for this ugly and poor drawing, but I just had Microsoft Paint  installed in the computer from where I'm writing this post:

First of all we have to calculate the right resistor to use for glowing the bulbs in the right way without blowing them, because depending on the central station you are using it can supply more than 12V. You know the formula for that: R = V / A

Let's find first the amperage consumed by the board. With a traditional N scale 12V transformer and connecting the tester in serial, we can see it consumes 50mA:

We measure also the voltage supplied by the decoder in the outputs, in my case is 18V that we have to drop to 12V with the resistor:

So the resistor to use is: R = (18V - 12V) / 0,05A = 120 Ohm

Now it's time to remove all diodes and components from the board, and leave only the bulbs. I also removed the current pick up arms and soldered the red and black wire of the decoder directly to the brass strips. My first idea was to take the decoder's supply also from the board because it has a kind of "current pick up arms", and it's possible to do it if you are just a bit skilled, but it's not my case and I couldn't find enough room for all wires.

That's the board finished. I used a SMD resistor to save space, soldered in the point where bulbs legs are joined.

The final assembly with interior lightning, using two diodes and a resistor, a good solution if your decoder for the cab car has only two outputs.

In this case I used a Doehler&Haass DHF250 decoder. Seems too large, but on the other hand it's only 2 millimeter thickness, so it's really easy to hide under the roof. A cheap and really good decoder.