Topic: Clonehead’s Slotcars lighting up a 289 Cobra

[Clonehead]

Thanks a lot
The General has got to be in the favorites customized section of my growing collection of cars.

I went to the train store over the weekend looking to restock on my led light needs. I have ate up some lights here in the last few weeks and wanted to see what they had available. All this stuff can be found at least in variations of some type more cheaply on the internet.
  I have this carrera Evolution Cobra that I chipped over the weekend and I knew I wanted a different color for its fog lights. Check these little jobbers out. At the end of the twisted wire on my finger. Smaller than what I showed before And certainly not as bright. You could fit these little things anywhere. Good for a 6 inch Vader chest plate with blinking sequenced multicolored lights if you liked.
These take little juice so I was able to solder wires from them onto the factory headlight chip boards and both light fine. I mounted the little orange leds by gluing the wires to the inner body of the car. They were stiff enough that from a glued position of a half inch back, I could position the led to illuminate the backside of the fog light lense as we have done before. I Need to find a way to mount the main head light chips so that they don’t illuminate the inside of the car body too much. I wondered about using a piece of shrinktube to serve as a light shield for this purpose. I mounted the rear red leds as close as I could to those insert backsides but some light still bleeds around the chip to shine so brightly from the inside to see it through the plastic body.   I had done one of these before, the blue one in the pic, but didn’t give it as much attention as this one is getting. I didn’t notice light bleed through problems with the blue one as much. Darker plastic, I guess. It’s light chips are just mounted in the chassis with superglue. We will probably open that one up again. It is probably the fastest car I got.

[Tamer]

Wow, now thats small. You ought to try this out on a Vader it would be awesome!

Off to share the latest.

[Clonehead]

I got it together but even with the headlight leds mounted very close, there is still a lot of interior illumination, I even used doubled up typing paper as a block for the tail light area and quite a bit bled through. May have to try something else.
   The fog lights in the blue Cobra are light by residual light from its led mount which is further back. No light bleed problem with that body.
The closer mounting of my tailight leds make them seem much brighter on the red Cobra. I think we may have to open up the blue one again.

[Clonehead]

And I owed you folks some pics of those little pico chip leds lit up by themselves. You can fit them anywhere but they are tricky to fiddle with. Small little buggers. You should be able to light several with 3volts, like from 2aaa batteries.
  These are so small and the wires are so easy to hide, Shawn, that they would be convincing on 3 3/4 scale equipment. Backpacks/guns/ whatever you can think of. Sometimes you have to go off on a tangent to gain new perspectives.

[Starchaser]

Really cool! Thanks for sharing. That Cobra looks great.

[Tamer]

Thats a lot of light for such a small thing. Off to share the latest.

[Clonehead]

Thank you starchaser, tamer, I need to find a cheaper resource for those little ones. A pack of 5 doesn’t last very long if yiu have several projects.

I have throwback Porsche 917 k racers of both scales that have a tailight array that was never lit from the factory that we have to address but since we are opening one up one of the 1/32 scale ones, I thought a little fog light addition was in order. Each front headlight housing has two lenses moulded in and the factory position of the front light board only illuminated the top lense on either side. The 1/24 scale versions have two leds per front housing, I believe. I want to give this one an upgrade.

To do the job, I chose these minitronics yellow button leds with resistors pack at the train store the other day. They are small enough to fit in the recess of each foglight lense and their leads can be bent in tawards the interior of the car, keeping the front wheel wells free. Resistors will be needed to keep the white headlight leds from being robbed of so much juice. I plan to wire the yellows into the white factory boards again.
  In the underside shot, I have my yellow buttons resisted, wires, shrunk tubes, and glue mounted into position. Time to wire them up and see if they work

[Tamer]

I sure am learning a lot by following this Clint. Thanks for the schooling. Off to share your update.

[Clonehead]

I haven’t gotten too technical with this, jargon wise, I hope. Trial and error for a while with this stuff has been my experience. After a while, you figure out how not to blow up your leds and after that, it gets easier.

I wasn’t happy with how much the white leds overpowered the yellow ones. I was wondering about trying the yellows without resistors to make them brighter but in this case, I believe it’s the white light making the whole housing glow enough to wash out the yellows. I will experiment with some kind of partition mounted in the lense perhaps. Still got brake lights to figure out on that one.
    Not content to see analog cars sit, I was anxious to try another pioneer car and chose this old Mustang notchback racer. Same general setup as the dukes charger but in a shorter wheelbase car of the same scale. I would be running the micro orange lights for the fog lights and chose some warm white and red rgb square leds for the headlights and taillights. This metal flake yellow plastic body will transfer light through like the red cobra so I’m considering trying to use paint as an interior light blocker and see how that works. The yellow seemed a bit plain or too fake looking so I used some Tamiya panel line accent to detail it up a bit for the trunk,door, and hood areas.

[Clonehead]

A couple of shots of the mounted RGB leds
After testing, I may change the rear ones out to light up more of the lense. Also, you see the test of one of the front fog mini lights mounted on the front of the chassis. This should light that fog lense perfect.

[Tamer]

Looks great to me Clint.

Back to the front pages.

[Clonehead]

Another quickie while I experiment with light blocking for the mustang.

Carrera 1/32 evolution 57 Chevy race version 2 produced 8 years ago.
Easily upgraded to digital by swapping the chips as before.
  There was a mount for a rear light bar but I ended up turning that around to give room for a pair of carrera red chip boards which I superglued into place. I noticed on this model, that extra layers of solid colored plastic were placed in front of light locations with 1/8 inch pass through holes already in place for the tailight lense and for a driving light lense on a street version of this model. I believe I may drill that lense location out of the front bumper one of these days. Anyways, the extra layers must have been to protect against light bleed through like we have experienced recently. I may have to take a different approach with the mustang.

[Clonehead]

Here is a shot of the shallow interior of this version. More room is allowed for the chip and wires in a model produced after the start of the slot car digital age.
On this race version, the lower half of the tail light lense is painted silver but the light shines right through it.

[Tamer]

Looks good Clint. I just watched Bumblebee and thought you would really like that movie. That 69 Camaro in that was for the win. Off to share the latest.

[Clonehead]

Haven’t gotten any further along.
Have some pics showing how much this pioneer mustang body glows from the inside with just the little orange micros on. The brake and head lights will show even worse. I may have to paint the interior of the entire shell to fight it. With this much transclucense, the body color will darken quite a bit when I do it.
  Hmm some sort of light shielding assembly to contain any installed lights and still fit. Perhaps I should have tried fiber optics for this car.
  Guess I could take em out and try again. Don’t think the micros will come out. I may try to fashion a shield with shrink tube cuttings, im not sure yet.