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Lighting starship kits


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I am no expert but I got one of those cheap battery powered fibre optic lamps from ebay, cut the fibres off and use these. You will be best reading a bit on LED's and resistors but it's not as complicated as it sounds. If you blow the led you need more resistance 😮

I drill holes with a pin vise Then heat the end of the fibre over a candle, it creates a little bulb shape that doesn't let the fibre fall through the hole. Then you just need to bunch the optics onto the end of the led.  I use heat shrink to hold it all together with some PVA.

I am sure there are plenty more experienced guys on the site but that's my experience.

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It all depends what you want to do with the lighting for basic static lighting then LEDs and fibre optics are your best bet, for any type of functionality then you need flashing LEDs, flickering LEDS or micro-processors like Arduino.

 

As far as resistors go it is best to use one per LED and wire in parallel so if an LED does go down it doesn't take others with it.  As a rule of thumb I use 47Ohm for 3V, 180Ohm for 4.5V, 470Ohm for 9V and 630Ohm for 12V. For 3V and 4.5V 1/8W resistors are fine, for 9V use 1/4W and for 12V use 1/2W.

 

Wire wise use Kynar wire, nice and thin and comes in many colours so you can use black for negative and a colour to suit the LED for positive so you don't forget!!

 

Arduino isn't that difficult to pick and allows you to sequence LEDs, change flash rates, fade them in and out, all sorts of fancy things!

 

Cheers,

 

Warren

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On 9/29/2018 at 2:32 PM, Mike Esposito said:

I just received the 1/1000 romulan bop from round 2 and I want to give a try lighting it. Never did lighting before so I have no idea how /where to start. 

 

Any tips would be welcome 

Thanks

Its a pain to do when your starting out, if MadMonk sells a kit get that, if not get THESE to custom make you a lights kit. I have used them for quite a few lighting kits. if you still want to make your own get a load of fiber, LEDs and resistors and start mucking about making up lights on your bench before trying to put them in a kit and do your homework, people say it easy but it gives me headaches. 

 

Some good info here just ignore all the stuff from me and read Getunderit and Wills posts. 

 

Good luck and have fun!

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