SEARCH FINESCALE.COM

Enter keywords or a search phrase below:

Enterprise incident lighting

892 views
4 replies
1 rating 2 rating 3 rating 4 rating 5 rating
  • Member since
    November 2005
Enterprise incident lighting
Posted by Anonymous on Tuesday, January 4, 2005 9:50 AM
Hi all, hope your holiday season went well and this new year's treating you well thus-far.

Having purchased the AMT 'Enterprise Incident' kit before christmas i decided that this new year should bring at least a few finished projects and as such set aside the kits my lazyness had allowed me to stall on -p.l TOS Enterprise, AMT Batmobile, Airfix James Bond and Toybiz Cap Am- to name a few! (serious case of 'the styrene is greener syndrome' !) and decided to build it to it's entirety - a start this year as i mean to go on sorta thing.

Anyhoo, i've drilled a million holes in the enterprise and one of the D7s (thru the use of what seems like 3million 0.35 drill bits!) and blacked the insides. Now i'm just left to wonder how to fix the fibre optics. I'd rather glue them on the inside before closing the ships up (as opposed to the dolop of cement that the instructions suggest be placed around the protruding fibres) but i'm unsure of what glue to use / if this is a good idea. Will PVA glue hold them, will CA craze / completely destroy them?

Also, a more brilliant effect would presumably result from the inside ends of the fibres being pointed straight at the light source (the supplied grain of wheat bulbs) but does this need to be the case to get a decent effect?

Any help would be much appreciated or any links to build ups of the kit or info on using optics in models would be great

Rob
  • Member since
    May 2004
  • From: Oregon
Posted by maxx1969 on Tuesday, January 4, 2005 4:40 PM
Hi Rob I can't speak for everyone but when I've used fiber optics in a kit i glued from the inside around the fiber with CA (it wont effect the fiber). The rest was done by the intructions with a small nub left to trim off the outside after painting. As to using the supplied bulbs I'm not to sure as I use the grain of wheat bulbs to light up the whole inside of a project and LED's to supply the fiber optics.

Matt
~Matt T Meyer
  • Member since
    February 2003
  • From: United Kingdom
Posted by cmtaylor on Tuesday, January 4, 2005 4:50 PM
Rather than using black to make the models light-proof, use silver - the metal flakes are opaque and also you reflext more light into the fibres. I also foind that poishing the cut ends of the fibres helps improve the transmittance
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here; this is the WAR ROOM!
  • Member since
    November 2005
Posted by Anonymous on Tuesday, January 4, 2005 5:25 PM
Rather than using wheat of grain bulbs(too much heat and not much light), go for high intensity LED's to supply light to the fiber optics.

Here is also another added twist that might help you.
Bundle the fiber optics together and insert them with the LED into heat shrink tubing, apply heat via the hairdryer and you got a sealed light source for the fiber optics.

As was said above polishing the end of the fibers with fine grain standpaper will help with the light transmission.

For the warp engines I would go with either Lightsheet or El-Wire to get an even glow.

HTH.
  • Member since
    November 2005
Posted by Anonymous on Thursday, January 6, 2005 6:33 AM
Hey guys, thanx for your help, I was worried about the glue situation so thanx for putting my mind at ease. i've also decided to strip the black off and re-do it in silver. I had heard of using white before but thought it might prove too translucent.

The sealed light unit idea was another good one, thanx. I'll definatly try that on some future projects (i'm planning on lighting a MaK fireball so it should be perfect for that). Whilst i would like to try the LED lighting tho, i'm not sure how to do that on this model. Everything was included by amt, including a pcb, set up to handle the supplied bulbs as well as the sound chip. i've nowhere near enough electrical knowledge to feel comfortable fiddling about with it!

I'm a little stalled on the project at the minute as i've a 4000 word essay to start and finish by tuesday (teacher training eh? i'm assured it's worth the effort!) so that's eaten up all my modeling time. I'm hoping to get back on track mid next week tho. Anyone want to see pictures when i'm done? (of the model, not the essay!)

Rob
JOIN OUR COMMUNITY!

Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.

SEARCH FORUMS
FREE NEWSLETTER
By signing up you may also receive reader surveys and occasional special offers. We do not sell, rent or trade our email lists. View our Privacy Policy.