Jasonb13

Sounds like a great project @Nocoolname, building the All Good Things... Ent-D, have you got a thread up for it? I have made a little progress. Thanks to the new FOs being just a little bit thicker than the old ones, they are also just a little bit more "solid", and I was able to push all four of them through the two nacelle trenches without having to take apart the trenches again. So that was a win! So I have all 4 new FOs fed into the Nacelles, and one Nacelle has its LEDs and clear blue plastic glued back in place, and the other one has its LEDs drying back in place as I type. All in all, not as bad as it could have been. With a bit of luck I should have the nacelles closed back up again soon. I'll be away from the bench for a few days, but it will be good to at least have some progress going again. Still need to work on making sure the FOs over the LEDs that are white only get white light and not red, green or blue, that's the next little solution to come up with.

A little update. New FOs have arrived. They are very slightly thicker than the ones I had, and they are 0.5mm, so the other ones must have been some sort of 1/60th of an inch or some American measurement, Anyhow, have done some very quick tests, and they flatten fine with the soldering iron, and after spraying a bit of the new FO with the silver paint, it hasn't gone brittle at all. So clearly the main issue was the age/condition of the original FOs, as I suspected. I have already stripped out all the other FOs, apart from the four in the nacelles, as I'm hopeful I might be able to use them to pull the new FOs through, without having to reopen the trenches. It's worth a shot anyhow! More progress soon hopefully...

So, the smoke has cleared a bit and I have taken stock. From what I can see, the FOs that aren't already snapped are clearly close to doing so. So I have decided to bite the bullet and replace all of the FOs. I have ordered some new ones, I should have them next week. When they arrive I will do some quick tests regarding light leaking from the sides, and how they react to paint etc, but I am more convinced that this issue is at least increased by the age of the FOs I am using, if not solely caused by it. Stripping out the existing FOs won't be too hard, putting in the new ones, especially in the nacelles, will be a different story. I am going to try to use the existing FOs in the nacelles as a way of pulling the new FOs in. I can glue the new FO to the end of the existing one and try pulling it through. If it works, then great, and if it doesn't then I am no worse off, and worst case I'll have to take off the PE trench covers. It would be great if I can avoid that though. I also lost one LED chip and one LED Bulb, both of which refuse to work after I sprayed the model. I have no idea why, they were masked, just like every other LED chip. Anyhow, I had a couple of spares, so they are already replaced. So I won't have much of an update until the new FOs arrive. I also have a busy time with family birthdays coming up, but hopefully I will get to try the new FOs and see what they're like. I also need to come up with the solution to ensure the FOs only pick up white light from the LEDs, and don't pick up the constituent RGB light, but I still think a little more height between the LED and the ends of the FOs will fix that. I will update more when I have the new FOs!

Thanks James! Well, I've got a few things done with this, but as they say, one step forward... Further tests have shown that flattening the FO ends is definitely the way to go, and I spent time getting all the FOs in place, either attached to the drilled holes in the hull or attached to the plastic cover that goes over the LED, depending on where they are and how free they need to be when assembling (as some of them go from one part of the model to another). I hit a little snag then, as I have RGB LEDs, and they basically light all three segments (Red, Green and Blue) to make white light. However, the FO ends are so close to the LEDs that some of them might pick up the individual Red, Green or Blue colour (or a mix of them) rather than White. Which leads to some FOs displaying the wrong colour. I am trying to come up with a plan for this, I think as long as I can have the FOs close, but not *too* close to the LEDs, then it should be ok. With that plan in mind, I moved ahead, got everything as far as I could before assembly, with the FOs cut down to size and threaded around the model etc., and then masked up the LEDs etc. so I could respray the insides silver, thereby covering all the red/green/black wires so that you can't see their colours through the windows. Here's how some of the masking looked... Then I sprayed away with my silver rattle can, which gave me this! All very shiny! I did some more work this evening, testing different ways of lifting the FOs off the LED, but not too far off it (as I still need to make sure light doesn't leak from it). It wasn't working great, so I left it and came back a couple of hours later. Did another test, and then noticed that some of the FO ends weren't lighting up at all. Did some investigating and quickly realised what has happened. The Silver paint has made the FOs brittle and 3 or 4 of them have snapped near the LED cover. So, this has the potential to be a real issue. I had already cut down the FOs, so there is very little slack to play with, so I don't know if I have enough left for them to now reach the LED. And if I don't some of the broken ones are from the Nacelles, and are fed through the PE covered trenches that are glued down. Worst case scenario, I may have to re-route a lot of the FOs and I don't know if I can do that without lifting those PE covers. The nacelles will have to be cracked open again too, but at least they are glued with White Glue, the PE is done with Super Glue. AND, I don't know if this behaviour is expected whenever FO and paint mix, or if it's also due to the age of my FOs (probably 35 years old, they're the ones that come with the kit). A quick google suggest FOs have a shelf life of 25-30 years, and I have already noticed that some of them are leaking light along their length. So, maybe, I need to look at buying new FOs and redoing *all* of them. Right now I'm stepping away from it before I try something that makes it worse! 🤬

I actually found some energy, so I got cracking, literally, and opened up the nacelles again. Did a quick test with one of the Fibre Optics (let's call them FOs, I can't keep on typing Fibre Optics!) and painted it black where it went into the drilled hole in the nacelle, and also anywhere else I could see it. Putting some lights on suggested that it looked a lot better, so I got the other three FOs painted too. Managed to snap two of them, but thankfully they were two that had some excess length and slack. With the FOs painted, I cleaned off the white glue from the upper nacelles, and glued them both back on again. One of them is now done, the other is clamped and drying. I took advantage of messing with the FOs again to try a test, comparing melting the top of the FO with a flame with flattening it with a soldering iron. I did one of each one two spare bits of FO, and then put a dollop of white glue on top. I was surprised to see the flattened one worked much better. So, knowing I have a little bit of excess FO to play with on the two I had to re-do, I flattened them rather than melted them, and we'll see how that goes! It's always possible that one method *is* better than the other, or maybe I just did a really good job with the first time I flattened it, and a poor job with melting, who knows? I'll test the two flattened ones on the nacelles with the dollop of white glue (which is needed to masked them before painting anyhow, and after painting I'll just remove it and add another dollop). It will be interesting to see how it works out. So, basically, all that work has me back where I was before, with the nacelles glued and their FOs in place. Hopefully the FOs are not leaking light this time though. And now I know to paint all the other FOs I'll be doing (there are 18 in total). I have to say, trying to get everything plugged in and wired up etc when I dry-fitted the whole model has made me quite concerned about that step when I am doing it for real, as it was *very* awkward, and I don't look forward to getting it done without pulling a wire or FO out. I will definitely need to leave some slack in all the FOs I can. The other thing the full light test showed me was that I really will have to re-spray all the insides silver again (apart from the LEDs themselves obviously), especially the wires, as the red and green wires really show through the windows. AND, another thing, I had a couple of windows "glazed" to test, and they were a lot darker than I had hoped. Hmmm... I am worried I'll glaze the windows at the end of the build and ruin the effect. But that's another day's (month's/year's) problem!

Another update, some good and bad news... Firstly, I made some progress, and testing "lensing" the fibre optics. Basically melting the top of the fibre optic to get it to melt back onto itself, forming a kind of mushroom shape, and then a dollop of white glue on top of it, seems to help get the light going through it to diffuse and be seen from 180 degrees, not just from directly above. So, with that knowledge, I got the Fibre Optics in the nacelles tidied up and that meant I could glue the nacelle halves together. I used White Glue, just in case I need to open them again. I also tided up the wiring so that the two nacelles are now permanently connected to each other, continuing the data link between them. I then decided to do a full light test. So I managed to get everything connected, the first time I have got power to all 4 power circuits, and fully completed the data circuit. It just showed me how complex and busy it all is in there, and it's very fiddly! Then I got the App up and running and set up all the different light types - White for the Windows, Flashing white on one which will be connected to Formation Lights, Blue LED for the Arboretum, Red and Green LEDs for the Nav Lights, and then blue for the nacelles. And after some teething problems, it actually all worked! Lots of tape holding the model itself together, but you get the idea. Had it on the floor as it was a bit darker and you can see the lights better. But... There is always a but... I noticed something on the nacelles... Specifically the point where the Fibre Optic comes out... You can see the pinpoint of the Fibre Optic on the left hand side of the pic, the top rear of the nacelle. It's lit up, and blue. Which means light from the nacelle is leaking out through the Fibre Optic, cos the Fibre Optic itself isn't connected to anything at the other end of it. It's happening on all four of them. So... good job I used White Glue! I'll have to break open the nacelles again, and see if I can paint/black out the Fibre Optics where they enter the nacelle plastic, and that will hopefully stop light leaking. We'll see if that does the job, and we'll see how easy it is to open up the nacelles. I suppose at least I noticed before I did the other Fibre Optics. I will have a look at that issue later, maybe not today, not sure if I have the energy to look at it. Putting it all together has shown me how complicated and fiddly all the wiring is, it's going to be very hard to get some of those wires connected properly and get the whole thing assembled together without pulling a wire/Fibre Optic somewhere!

Thanks a lot! It's getting there... No pics but I have the upper saucer LEDs fully glued and I now have the 7 LEDs in the lower saucer in place and wired and the glue drying. So, basically, all the LEDs are now in place, finally! I'm not finished with the lights yet though. I need to figure out the Nav Lights/Fibre Optics issue, so they are visible from side-on. Then I need to put them in place, and connect the four separate LED circuits while putting together some of the sub-assemblies. But it is progress!

Thanks! @81-er! However, I wasn't convinced as there are too many windows were you can actually see the LED through the window, leading to a lot of what I'm calling "hot spots" in the lights. I tried a couple of things, like tracing paper over the LEDs, and even "glazed" a couple of windows to see what that would do in terms of diffusion, but I still wasn't happy with it. So, instead of having LEDs on each saucer half facing the other saucer half, I decided to have the LEDs in two circles, one facing out towards the edges of the saucers, and one facing in towards the centre. That way, all the LEDs are side on when you look through the windows, and you shouldn't get as many hot spots. I did some dry-fitting and was happier with the results... After some testing, and god help me, some maths, I figured out where the 9 LEDs facing out towards the edge of the saucer should go... And I quickly realised that I would need to cut down the wires a lot, from their original size (upper wire) to the new size (lower wire)... And then, of course, solder them back together again! Then I could cover them in heat shrink, to keep them separate from each other (the heat shrink is yellow purely because it was the size that fit easiest). And then start wiring the LEDs, one by one... And that leads me to where I am tonight. All 12 LEDs on the lower saucer done, 9 pointing towards the edge, and three pointing up (one to give good light to the "bridge" and the other two will be Nav lights with Fibre Optics running off them). I have a couple of sections glued and drying, and when they are dry I will glue a couple more sections and keep on working around until all of them are glued in place. All in all maybe 4 or 5 hours work, but I am happy with it, and am happy with having a plan and making progress. When that's all done, then I can put the remaining 7 LEDs on the other saucer, in a circle facing inwards, using the same method. I might get that done tomorrow, there are less LEDs and I know the method/plan now, so that should help speed it up a little. After that, I will actually have all the LEDs in place. Then it's a case of figuring out the best order for joining together the sub-assemblies and running the Fibre Optics around the model as well. I also still need to solve another issue, how to make the Nav-Lights visible when side-on (as Fibre Optics only show light when you are looking at the end of the fibre, if you look at it from 90 degrees you don't see any light). But that's another day's problem to solve!

Another update! Had a great trip to the Scottish National Scale Model Show in Perth, such a good show. Met with Andy there (https://www.scalectronics.com/) and he very kindly upgraded the firmware on my control to the latest version, which can handle 40 LEDs. I got the extra LEDs too, and then just enjoyed the rest of the show. Unfortunately it also means it's been a year since I first bought the LED set, but let's not focus on that too much! Back home, I have dry-fitted the LEDs into the saucer, waited for it to get dark outside, and here are some not great photos of how it now looks... Upper Saucer: Lower Saucer: Some of the windows are really bright as there is a LED directly beneath them. I am hoping to diffuse the light a little to reduce that. It's hard to capture well, but it's looking a lot better. I will hopefully decide on the final location of the LEDs and then start wiring and gluing them permanently, that's the next step...

Thanks for your advice! So far I haven't hit any issues. The controller's software lets me choose one of more LEDs in the chain and then set them to whatever colour, brightness and effect (solid, flashing etc.) I want. The vast majority are gonna just be solid white (for the windows and for the nacelles etc. as the clear plastic in the nacelle is coloured already). I will use one Blue for the Arboretum, a red and a green for Nav lights and a flashing white for formation lights. That's it I think, the rest are white. The main thing I will change apart from that is brightness, I might want some LEDs to be a bit dimmer or brighter depending on their location.

Yep, it's an ideal solution, 10 extra LEDs gives me more than enough. I could also have looked into "pairing" the 6 in each nacelle to each other (so that each pair of LEDs would be treated as one in the software) but that would have been messier, given me less control over those LEDs, and only free up 6 more for me to use. This solution is much tidier, gives me an extra 10 LEDs, and I only have to wait two weeks for it (and not even have to pay for postage). So very much a win/win!

So, I've started trying out different fittings of LEDs in the saucer section. I have 9 LEDs to play with, as my LED controller can only control 30 LEDs, and I've used 21. Two of those 9 are for the flashing formation lights and the green Nav lights, so that leaves me with 7. And try as I might, I just couldn't get the 7 LEDs to light up every corner of the saucer (if you know what I mean!) Some of the windows near the edge were lit, but not very well. I had a think about it and found an old email from Andy (Scalectronics - the designer of the LED system) saying he was going to have a new firmware that would upgrade the controller to 40 LEDs. Gave him a quick email and he can upgrade mine for me, and even better, he can do it in 2 weeks when we're both in the Perth Model show. So that's my plan, bring my controller, upgrade the firmware, buy 10 more LEDs and light the saucer properly! While this technically is a delay of two weeks, I'm quite happy with it as firstly it means I'll have more light in the saucer, and secondly I have now basically figured out how to wire/light it anyhow, the only difference is adding more LEDs to the equation. So I basically now know what I'm doing to have the whole thing wired. I'll probably use these two weeks to get the Fibre Optics sorted for the Red/Green and Flashing White lights, as I can still work on them while I am waiting.

Thanks, I am really happy with it as I wasn't sure how I was going to do it, but once the idea came of having the LED in a different part of the model, and not inside the saucer itself, it worked out well. More like barely going Dermot! 😊

Actually, I just realised that I now have 21 LEDs wired, and only 9 left to do (two of which will have Fibre Optics running off them), all in the main saucer. So I am actually begining to get close to the end of the wiring! And the end of the wiring will mean assembling the whole kit, slowly but surely!

A little bit more work done. Firstly, after doing my best to fill and sand (and I just know it will need more work) I wanted to make sure I hadn't broken anything, so a quick lighting test with the nacelles in place... I will be doing lighting tests a lot, I don't want to finish some step and then realise the lights don't work any more! I then started figuring out the join between the neck and the saucer. The Arboretum windows are on the rear edge of the saucer, and they should be blue, but I don't want the blue light leaking. I came up with a plan, which involved drilling a hole in the part of the upper neck that end up directly below the arboretum windows, and putting an LED into that hole. The other little holes were just tests from earlier in the build. And the dry fitting it all together and seeing what it looks like... Yep, I know it's not blue (yet), but it still works pretty well. It also has the bonus of the middle plastic part, between the two windows, covering the LED itself, and I can put some tracing paper over the LED itself to help diffuse it a little. All in all I'm happy with that solution. I've now also drilled some holes in the front upper neck and bottom lower saucer, so I can run cables and fibres from the lower hull all the way up into the upper saucer. I'm gonna glue the Arboretum LED in permanently tonight, and then I'll pretty much be at the point where I can glue the upper neck onto the sides of the neck, and enclose that area a little. Before I do that I will be spraying the inside all silver again, including any visible wiring, just to try to make any red/green wires less visible through windows!

I have actually managed to get a little more done. I got the two PE covers for the wires glued down. They were quite fiddly, and will need a lot of filler and sanding along the edges to smooth them into the plastic a bit more (a skill I have *never* mastered) but at least the wires are covered now. The Tamiya tape in the middle of the photos is just keeping the fibre optics tidy and out of the way. Next up will be that filler/sanding, to see if I can blend them in a bit. After that, it's finishing off the wiring in the upper hull/neck, and then getting started on the Saucer section.

I hope ye are all sitting down, 'cos I have actually made some progress. I got the trenches dug deeper with the dremel, and bit the bullet and actually glued the two nacelles in place (though the nacelle halves aren't glued together yet, so I still have access to their internals). Here's how it looks now... From what I can tell, the trenches are now deep enough and the PE sections lie flat over the wires in them. I'm gonna glue those wires down a little bit to keep them in place, and then I'll look at putting the PE parts over them. Actual progress, who would have thunk it?

I just love Wes' expression at the end!

What episode is that from?

He'd get Geordi to do it!

Sigh... So this crashed against the wall of lost mojo. I got a bit more done, replacing some of the RGBW LEDs with the new RGB LEDs, and I also tested the Fibre Optics for my Nav Lights... The connection to the LED will need more blackout to stop light leaking, but the theory clearly works, and those four Fibre Optic threads can go around the model to the correct spots. It's becoming clearer to me that the inside of this model is gonna be rather full of cables/fibres going everywhere! In an attempt to keep things moving, I decided to look at putting on the nacelles, and covering the trenches with the PE covers. But when I did that, I realised that the trenches aren't deep enough, and that finally killed my mojo. "All" I need to do is use the dremel some more but I just didn't have the interest in it. I will try to get back to it though, I think having the nacelles in place, and the PE covers on etc. will help me feel like this build is actually getting somewhere. We'll see how long it takes for me to get to it...

Andy had been brilliant. Considering I bought a Starter set off him last April, and then didn't get anything else at all off him until Christmas when I got the additional LEDs, he has still replied to all my email during last year, asking questions about wiring and advice about set up etc. He's probably sick of hearing from me at this stage!

A bit of a backwards step... While testing some of the LEDs I noticed some issues, they all came on in White ok, but if I tried to make one Red (for the Nav lights) it was misbehaving. Swapped some email with the ever-patient Andy in Scaletronics, and it turns out I ordered the wrong LEDs when I was ordering additional ones. He's replacing them for me, so when they arrive I'll have to strip out a couple of the wrong ones and replace them with the correct ones. At least I spotted it before I glued any model parts together, but it will take a couple of hours to get sorted and back on track again!

Well, life has been manic this last couple of weeks, but I have managed to make a *little* progress. After my last wiring photo, I now have wiring going from the Daisy chain up to the LED stuck inside the upper hull roof, and then wiring going from that to the LED stuck inside the back of the neck. The wiring from that LED isn't done yet, but it will go down to the Deflector Dish LED, which is the last LED in this particular parallel circuit. And that got me working on the Deflector dish, cos I can only stick that LED in place when the Deflector Dish is in place. Which meant I had to break out the airbrush for the first time in I don't know how long. Firstly, here's the Deflector Dish section from the Generations Movie model... And here's my attempt at it... The yellow in mine isn't that bright under normal lighting, and the light in the real model pic is quite dark, so it's a decent approximation I think. I'll probably do some very light weathering just to stop it looking brand new. With this piece done, I had to do some dry fitting to see what it looks like lit up... I'm quite happy with that, especially as none of it is sealed up and light is leaking everywhere. I think I will use a bit of tracing paper to diffuse the light a little, and I might even make this LED blue to see if that works better, rather than white light coming through the blue plastic. So, next for me is to get the wiring from the neck LED to the Deflector Dish done (it needs to be shortened a little) and I'm trying to leave connectors between sections like lower hull, upper hull, neck etc. so that I can disconnect the wires when I need to work on the sections, and reconnect them before I finally get around to gluing. I also need to sort out the Fibre Optics in the lower hull, including the Red Nav lights running from one of the Daisy Chain LEDs, and the other Fibre Optics which will run up to bulbs in the Saucer section. Once I have the final wiring and Fibre Optics run in the lower hull/neck, then I do get to move onto the saucer section. I *think* the toughest part there will be lighting the Arboretum windows blue without lighting anything nearby blue, but I'll see.

Yep, while I can adjust the brightness of each individual LED, it's just not worth the hassle of getting a bulb in there, when it's getting enough light anyhow!