Tokyo Metro Ginza Line Series 01 - disappointing interior

[cteno4]

so are the figures actually taller than your doors? or is it that the floor is just higher than it should be and starts part way up the door?

 

jeff

[keitaro]

have you got some figures?? get a carriage and grab a n sized figure. place the figure against the door of the train and you will find it either on par with the top of the door or higher.

 

since the floor is same level of the door or in some more compact models like the ginza a touch higher than the bottom of the door.

 

It means any nscale figure will clash with interrior lights. (excluding sitting figures) but then with sitting figures you have the can't actually sit in the seat properly issue.

 

Again with zscale there is no need to cut the legs of sitting figures as they can be glued in position and still look ok even though they are not seated correctly.

[cteno4]

yes i have plenty of them. i was referring to your model and people.

 

i grabbed a half dozen random trains. the 1/150 doors were around 13-13.5mm, about right at around 6' 6". pretty much what i remember, im tall and most train doorways are a close brush with some hop in your step. 500 was at 12.5 but thats 1/160 scale so works out the same.

 

on the figures most 1/160 scale figures i have were in the 10-12mm range about right.

 

on tomytec 1/150 they were 9-11.5mm range

 

kato 1/150 they were 10-11mm range

 

on the chinese 1/150 figures (i think the ones you are using here) they were 9 to almost 13 mm, most around 11.5. they seemed a tad larger on the whole than the kato or tomytec, but not by a huge amount

 

japanese average height 19yr old height is 1.715m for males and 1.580m for females so these seem to match up pretty well.

 

most 1/150 and 1/160 n scale figures seem to lack maybe a standard deviation off the mean or less though.

 

the floor height being higher than the door base does cause a problem. then need to chop off feet to match the difference! for the above lights, thats because they hang low not the figures being too high.

 

only issue with z scale people is that they overall mass will be smaller. if this is a problem with the car floor being high better to chop off some feet to get the right height and body masses maybe.

 

jeff

[CaptOblivious]

The bright lighting is a problem.  It's something I'm planning to rectify once I go DCC.  I expect to be using a Schotky diode and a 680 Ohm resistor (or something similar) to bring that current down.

 

There's an easier way…skip the diode. Just use the resistor. A low-forward-voltage diode isn't actually doing anything, and can be safely omitted. Cuts your component count, and hence the assembly time, in half! :D

[CaptOblivious]

yeah best thing is they are perfect height in this model only 1 figure touches the lights. just and putting the plastic didn't move the figure just touches it.

 

IMO the nscale figures are either too big or the trains are too low on height a n scale figure will be taller than the door on most models i mean i never seen no one in japan have to bend their head down to get in a train and very rare in any country except for giants.

 

This is really interesting. The figures do look great through the window, but there is also the impression, as someone said, that they are standing on the seats. I recall that on my Kato E231-500 (half a world away right now, so I can't look), the bottom of the doors was well below the "floor" of the cars; I could almost stand Tomytec figures in the little wells next to the door, but had to cut their legs off elsewhere. With the Ginza line model, which is so much smaller, I can only imagine that the difference is greater. But I suppose the viewing angle does matter. From directly side-on, maybe the smaller figures give a pleasing forced-perspective look? Or does the disparity with the door stand out? So hard to tell from photographs!

 

Anyway, I follow this thread with intense interest, as I wish to populate all of my trains too!

[The_Ghan]

There's an easier way…skip the diode. Just use the resistor. A low-forward-voltage diode isn't actually doing anything, and can be safely omitted. Cuts your component count, and hence the assembly time, in half! :D

 

Actually, I think you're right.  Since the resistor is limiting the current through the whole circuit, in both directions, the LED should be able to handle a 3v reverse current, right?

 

Cheers

 

The_Ghan

[KenS]

I've wondered about that myself. I'd have thought since the effect of the resistor was proportional to current it wouldn't protect in the reverse direction since the damage would be done before the current began to flow. But in some very limited testing I did with 12V and a LED with a 5V limit it wasn't harmed (at least not immediately and obviously) by reverse current. So perhaps it takes current, not just reverse voltage, to damage a diode junction, and the resistor prevents that from happening.

[keitaro]

Don't leds have a reverse current limit??? so as long as the resistor is on par or below that limit it should be fine? 

 

I think it's called Peak Inverse Voltage

 

though i'm not really an electronics man to comment on that but i have notices ledd come with specs that mention this.

[CaptOblivious]

Don't leds have a reverse current limit??? so as long as the resistor is on par or below that limit it should be fine?  

 

I think it's called Peak Inverse Voltage

 

though i'm not really an electronics man to comment on that but i have notices ledd come with specs that mention this.

 

This should go in another thread; mods, could you split it off?

 

Remember, that by Ohm's law, voltage and current are proportional: When you drop the current (via the current-limiting resistor), you also drop the voltage. Now, this isn't always true, because there will be very little current flowing across a reverse-biased diode, and so the reverse voltage is important to pay attention to. But once you put a sufficiently large current-limiting resistor with it, no problem. Why: What causes the damage is, as has been surmised, not the voltage itself, but the resulting large current can occur. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_polarity_of_LEDs#Polarity

 

Another trick is to put a second diode in parallel, but reverse, with the first. (E.g., when you have a headlight and a taillight wired in parallel.) Then all the current will always flow through one of the two, taking the reverse voltage pressure off the other one.

 

At any rate, The Ghan's realization is correct. But, moreover, with any LED lighting kit, there is already a diode bridge rectifying the incoming voltage, to ensure that the interior lights will come on regardless of direction (on DC). As it happens, this means they will always come on full power on DCC as well, exactly what we want. So the LED in the interior lighting kit will never experience a reverse voltage. You can place the resistor basically wherever you want in the current path, and it will have its full effect.

[The_Ghan]

Captn's last comment brought a couple of things to mind:

 

1. DCC decoders supply DC so bridge rectifiers are not required when using a decoder;

 

2. My point of adding the resistor was to dumb down the brightness of the LEDs and make them look more prototypical;

 

3. For the purpose of what we are doing, resistors work like putting kink in your garden hose.  It doesn't matter where the kink is, the effect is the same.

 

Cheers

 

The_Ghan