What did you do on your layout today? (N scale)

[cteno4]

I think it’s somewhere on the forum, I remember it.

 

jeff

[Coromant]

18 hours ago, ChibiNippon said:

 

Do you have a link to this video?

 

Hello ChibiNippon!

 

This is the video, from ~2:30 You see from upwards. This was the inspiration to my tomytec signals project, but i'm failed with it :)

 

best regards,

Coromant

[Khaul]

I have been a bit distracted lately, but I finally got something done in my layout (details below). 

 

It was my younger son's birthday a couple of weeks ago. He turned 9, his brother is 10 close to 11. They sometimes help with doing something with the trains, but they are way too fiddly for them. So Simon go this bad boy for his birthday:

This thing is quite some fun. I am used to micro rc planes and N scale trains so I thought the car would be easy. Well, it was not. I spent much of my hobby time breaking in the motor, setting the suspension... but it is now done and going strong.

 

Now, back to the Tsurumi line, I finished the overhead beams in the loading dock. Even more importantly, I finally glued the background. The module, sorry section, is pretty much done. Only pending there are some adjustments and details. Piccies:

 

General view. The chimney at the corner needs painting. I thought the glue gun would be a good idea to attach the background. I was wrong. The glue dried too mast and I had to clean it. Eventually I used good old PVA.

 

Loading dock scene with a Toki25000 in the Das Steinkopf style.

 

The same Toki in the branch line, with the boiler in the background.

 

Panoramic view of the module.

Edited June 4, 2019 by Khaul

[railsquid]

Working on the station approach...

 

main-station-approach-2019-06-07_02 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

(more)

[bill937ca]

Cleaning up the north end of the layout today. Running a Kato Keikyu 2100 and a Tomix Odakyu 4000 around the layout.

 

[Sheffie]

A little bit of ballasting work. The layout is starting to look like a few areas that need doing, rather than a few areas that have been done, surrounded by mess. 

 

[Kiha66]

The layout is progressing very well Tim, you're putting the rest of us to shame!

[Keith]

1 hour ago, Kiha66 said:

The layout is progressing very well Tim, you're putting the rest of us to shame!

I agree, it’s great to plan a great scheme in your head, but actually building something rather than accumulating boxes is a far better use of time and I assume far more rewarding.

[Khaul]

A few days ago I run an operating session with my almost finished section. I connected the two ends of the module in a simple double track loop. I shot some night video of it. Things did not go completely as planned and the result is a bit of a strange experiment, but I quite like the atmosphere. It reminds me of long overnight train travel in Spain. The missus says she likes the chiaroscuro. 

 

 

Edited June 15, 2019 by Khaul

[cteno4]

Nice Kahului! very film noir feeling!

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

Nice! I like that the lights aren't overly bright, as is often the case.

[Pauljag900]

15 minutes ago, Martijn Meerts said:

Nice! I like that the lights aren't overly bright, as is often the case.

 

Like mine😂😂👍I need to find a way of turning the street lights down! 

Any ideas anyone? I read somewhere about fitting resistors to reduce the voltage but mine are all 3v so would it work ok?

would I need to fit one resistor per light or could I fit it in line on the main power feed,therefore reducing the voltage to all the lights?

i have thought about connecting them to a train controller to test the theory,does anyone know if that would work?

my other option,having realised it’s too bright would be to simply disconnect a few wherever I need to.

 

[chadbag]

21 minutes ago, Pauljag900 said:

 

Like mine😂😂👍I need to find a way of turning the street lights down! 

Any ideas anyone? I read somewhere about fitting resistors to reduce the voltage but mine are all 3v so would it work ok?

would I need to fit one resistor per light or could I fit it in line on the main power feed,therefore reducing the voltage to all the lights?

i have thought about connecting them to a train controller to test the theory,does anyone know if that would work?

my other option,having realised it’s too bright would be to simply disconnect a few wherever I need to.

 

 

You can stick the resistors in.  You could get a variable pot resistor and hook it to the main 3V feed and use that to adjust all on that feed at once.  At least to get some basic values to work with.  You can also stick an individual resistor on each lights lead from the main power bus.

[cteno4]

Paul,

 

yep the best way to lower them would be a resistor for each. If you do more leds on one resistor you do run the risk that all the leds are not matched and if one of them lets more current thru than the others you will see that one brighter than the others. Luckily using 3v you won’t burn out that led but it may not be even. You might try 3 on one resistor.

 

Luckily at 3v supply you won’t be burning much power in the resistor, so that's not a problem if you gang them up.

 

do you have any resistors in your circuit now? It’s a little dangerous to not have something in there to limit current some Incase your 3v supply varies some. Most white leds are around 3-3.3v forward voltage needed to drive them. I wonder if it’s a 3.3v power supply as that’s a standard for integrated circuits.

 

might take a street and try doing like 6 on one side individually and the other side 2 sets of 3 and see how it looks. But first play with some different resistor levels to see what it looks like to zero in on a value to use for all of them. You can use a variable resistor and fiddle till it looks good then use the multimeter to see what the resistance is at that setting on the variable resistor and get fixed resistor close. But check with a fixed before you dive in and do them all. If you have a handful of extra streetlights just mock it up on some foam board to play with and plop some colored paper down and buildings and cars to get an idea of how it will look before reworking the layout.

 

other idea would be go run 3 streetlights in serial and one led for those and supply 12v. Then set the resistor to the right level to get the desired brightness. Start at like 330 ohms (driving the leds at 10ma) and go up from there to where it’s right).

 

this is the tricky part of scale lighting as it’s an art to find what gives the best effect looking at it. Light intensity is proportional to the inverse square of the distance away so It makes things hard to anticipate how it will look at scale. It’s more of fiddling with it until lit just looks good and right to the eye.

 

Cheers,

 

jeff

[Pauljag900]

Cheers gents.

i was thinking of getting one of these to try on some spares I have.Im thinking of trying it on one light and then on a few wired together it imitate what’s on the layout,

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F163091515028

would it work ok do you think gents?

i m ok at wiring the lights in as they are,(I think😂😂) but now thinking I d like to try and take it to the next level by varying the brightness of areas and buildings,both individually and in groups.

 

[Pauljag900]

1 hour ago, cteno4 said:

Paul,

 

yep the best way to lower them would be a resistor for each. If you do more leds on one resistor you do run the risk that all the leds are not matched and if one of them lets more current thru than the others you will see that one brighter than the others. Luckily using 3v you won’t burn out that led but it may not be even. You might try 3 on one resistor.

 

Luckily at 3v supply you won’t be burning much power in the resistor, so that's not a problem if you gang them up.

 

do you have any resistors in your circuit now? It’s a little dangerous to not have something in there to limit current some Incase your 3v supply varies some. Most white leds are around 3-3.3v forward voltage needed to drive them. I wonder if it’s a 3.3v power supply as that’s a standard for integrated circuits.

 

might take a street and try doing like 6 on one side individually and the other side 2 sets of 3 and see how it looks. But first play with some different resistor levels to see what it looks like to zero in on a value to use for all of them. You can use a variable resistor and fiddle till it looks good then use the multimeter to see what the resistance is at that setting on the variable resistor and get fixed resistor close. But check with a fixed before you dive in and do them all. If you have a handful of extra streetlights just mock it up on some foam board to play with and plop some colored paper down and buildings and cars to get an idea of how it will look before reworking the layout.

 

other idea would be go run 3 streetlights in serial and one led for those and supply 12v. Then set the resistor to the right level to get the desired brightness. Start at like 330 ohms (driving the leds at 10ma) and go up from there to where it’s right).

 

this is the tricky part of scale lighting as it’s an art to find what gives the best effect looking at it. Light intensity is proportional to the inverse square of the distance away so It makes things hard to anticipate how it will look at scale. It’s more of fiddling with it until lit just looks good and right to the eye.

 

Cheers,

 

jeff

Hi Jeff,

no I do nt use resistors,I take the easier option of using the same voltage power supply as the led,which are all 3v so I just use a 3v power supply.

[cteno4]

Paul,

 

then best to use a resistor then and get them to the brightness you want. You can probably get away with three or so in parallel if you know they are the same batch of leds. If in doubt at all you will need a resistor for each led to keep things the same. Again some testing.

 

if you don’t want to bother with a lot of soldering you might try just nipping one wire and stripping like 7mm off each end. Then twist ends and slip a piece of heat shrink that is pretty snug fitting to the insulation over and have it cover like 10mm from the end of the insulation (so the end of the stripped wire is like 3mm indented inside). The. Cut the resistor lead back to 9mm long and jam one end into the end of the heat shrink with the wire so that the heat shrink is up against the body of the resistor and shrink the heat shrink. This may give a pretty sturdy connection that would resist light tugs on it. Can also put a drop of thick ca glue at the joint of the resistor body and end of the heat shrink, should make it withstand a pretty good jerk. Might actually be good with the streetlights to have a breakaway like this in case you ever accidentally jerk hard on a wire and that gets jerked on the led solder joint itself.

 

experiment some you may find a simple way to get it done with minimal work.

 

it is a bit dangerous to run the leds off the 3v as a surge in voltage could cause over current situation on your leds. Any small value resistor in there would stop this and higher will start dimming them as needed.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[cteno4]

Just thinking about this while fixing some lunch. You might be able to just nip the resistor leads to like 5-7mm and just cram the short lead into the cut end of the wire up to the resistor body. The. Just a drop of thick ca glue at each joint of resistor and insulation or blob of silicone seal or instant insulation over the resistor and insulation ends to seal and lock together. Or a bit of heat shrink over it seal and tie together. I used transparent heat shrink and tugged pretty hard to separate this one like a mm.

 

The 1/8w resistors usually have pretty small gauge wire and cram into the wire well and the resistor body is about the side of the insulation on like 20-24g wire.

 

jeff

[Sheffie]

Finished filling the inner area of the layout with grass and ballast.

 

[Pauljag900]

Well the 1-75 scale street lights turned out just fine as the soccer pitch floodlights.

now Fukuoka FC can play night games👍😂😂

 

P

Edited June 16, 2019 by Pauljag900

[nah00]

A while ago I hurriedly slapped the Walther's North Island refinery building together and never painted it. After years of staring at ugly shiny gray and yellow plastic I decided to do something about it. Nice thing about using super glue for assembly is that you can generally work bits off, I was able to pull off all of the railings, wanted to do the ladders too but I would have mangled them. The fractioning columns and furnace came apart easily, also I was able to better match up some of the pipes on reassembly. Here it is done and lightly weathered (seems refineries aren't as dirty as one would think):

Added some workers on the main fractioning tower to give it some interest. Here it is back on the layout:

At some point I want to paint the furnace stack to match the other 3 exhaust stacks, thought of putting an LED on it too. I forgot which color yellow I used on the storage tanks in the back so the railings don't match but I'm not too concerned about that. 

[Pauljag900]

Finally finished illuminating the village area,that’s the back board finished in terms of lights.

 

[Sheffie]

Looking good!

[chadbag]

I like the soccer lights!   It all looks way cool.

[Chuo]

The lights really add something special. 😍