Has anyone ever utilized LED type lights to model an airport runway in O-scale? If so, please provide details. Any ideas or suggestions would be welcome. thanks.
John
TCA
Are you talking about the lights that outline the taxiways/runways or the approach lights for the runway? Taxiway/runway lights could be simulated with surface mount leds of appropriate colors. Approach lights, I’d use 3mm white leds.
soldering to SMD parts can be hard, but it’s doable. 28 or 30 gauge wire would be the best size to use in my opinion.
What about using fibre-optics ?
We used the small incandescents on the club layout and they require almost constant maintenance.
When I was a teenager, many moons ago, I wired up small flashligt bulbs in series, ran them off of 12-14 volts. Never had one burn out in at least 10 years of operation. I don’t remember how many there were, at least 10 to 12.
Take a look at Miniatronics. They manufacture both LEDs and incandescent bulbs.
Incadescents could be a better choice for airport runway lights. The colored micro mini bulbs could be just the thing you are looking for, maybe blue.
http://www.miniatronics.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=1
Rich
http://www.bakatronics.com/shop/category.aspx?catid=117
You can also find strings of 10 or more grain of wheat bulbs wired either for battery operation or with standard American 110v plugs at craft stores. Look in the wedding or Christmas departments, they’re sold there for use in centerpieces and wreaths among other things. If you build up a runway shoulder, you can hide the wires underneath. Either poke the bulbs up through or punch holes in the shoulder and line them with translucent blue plastic. Foamcore is an excellent lightweight medium for modeling runways. Take a trip out to your local airport or just do a google search on airport modeling to get ideas about what airfield lighting fixtures look like.
I love commercial aviation too.
Becky
I used a strand of Christmas LEDs I picked up at Target for $5. They come in different colors and run on four AA batteries. I have a couple photos posted in my layout update thread. I only used the red and blue for my runway and hid the rest of them.
Joe
You will need blue lights for the taxi ways and white for the runways. Charlie
There was a photo in CTT from a while back of a fellow who built and sold a runway scene with aircraft and flashing lights. I’ll look for it.
This Wikipedia article has a lot of information about lighting and markings on prototype runways: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runway