Well, I just wanted to share a tip that my local hobby shop guy (Pacific Railway Hobbies) shared that worked AWESOME! I was working on my GE44 and noted that the lights on it seemed dim (LED’s actually) due to the “light tubing” installed and such. I also noted my P2K FA had the same problem (it has a lamp). Anyway, he recommended the following:
Remove light or LED and take out the “light tubing”
If glazing is required, do this and wait 24 hours.
Measure diameter or light or LED. Cut a piece of round (tubing) aluminum (with matching inside diameter). Check fit and crimp end so it fits snug.
Now glue this small rod into your shell (making sure everything fits…may need adjustment). REMEMBER to use a glue that WILL NOT (in other words NOT NOT NOT CA) frost the glazing…(forgot this on the FA!!! Had to make a new lens…)
Now place lamp or LED into casing and reassemble locomotive.
BAM… I got about 100% more light from this… I just wanted to share… sorry no pics. Did this on both locomotives last night… Hope you like.
Brian
EDIT: To clarify (thanks Lothar) the round aluminum is TUBE stock (tubing) with hollow center like an O. Sorry if this was not clear.
The aluminum makes a housing for the lamp or LED to sit in and reflects some of the light towards the lens. Worked well for me… I will post pics as soon as I can tonight…
I’ve found that black heat shrink around the head of the LED and over the light tube helps to direct the light, too. If the light tube or lense is large enough in diameter to house an LED, I drill a hole in the center of the light tube or lense (about 1/2 way through) and glue the LED in with Elmer’s white glue. I did that with my Stewart FT headlight and it worked great!
For my P2k S1, I got rid of the light tube entirely and remounted the cab-end LED right behind the lens, where it belongs. This also puts the leakage light into the cab, which is OK, instead of having it spill out on the trucks where it looks all wrong.
Tom, I don’t know if this is relevant or not, but it would seem to me that black heat shrink would tend to absorb photon energy from the light source and to heat up a bit. This might be entirely innocuous for an LED, but I’m not sure about a rice-grain bulb. Just thinking…
I was thinking about this. I wonder if just painting the stock light tube silver would work? Or gold to give the light that “golden” look? (just a thought?) I’ve got an old LL loco I might try it on.
It’s not an issue for incandescents in either of our applications.
I’ve been doing custom light installations of all kinds for 18 years and the problem with light rods is not with the transmission of light through the rod, but rather the alignment of the light souce and the recieving end of the light rod, it needs to be as close to dead center as possible or the light waves will scatter as they go down the rod.
If you check an old classic Atlas or Kato’s light bars/rods you will find that they are wider or flared at the recieving end to make up for inaccuracies in alignment, P2K and others have a round internal bezel and require more accurate aiming of the light source. Sometimes all it takes to get better output is a readjustment of the light source, sometimes the shrink tubing trick works and sometimes more drastic measures are required.
I have an Athearn PA2 that I just installed a 12v bulb in. The headlight lenses light up fine but there was way too much light showing on the track under the front of the loco. I blocked most of it with electrical tape but it wasn’t enough. When I read the post about using an aluminum tube I struck upon the idea of wrapping some aluminum foil around the bulb. That did the trick.