I use unpainted HO male Preiser figures for my passenger cars. I pick out about a dozen that I really like then make molds of them. I don’t chop up the masters. Then I make resin casting and chop them up and reconfigure them in several different poses. When I have several that I want more of I make molds of them.
I haven’t had much luck finding unpainted female figures so I went with a half dozen 1:87 ShapeWays females and used the same process to come up with a couple of dozen molds.
I hand paint all my castings using Crafters Acrylic paints.
Wow, you looked at every post in that thread! [wow] Glad it was inspirational. The layout was no more than half time when I was doing that thread. I was working on my dissertation, but have a serious set of back issues, so had to get up and do something else on my feet every hour or so.
I see where you’re still DC. It’s just not as friendly to carlighting with LEDs, so going the battery route may be your best bet.
Keeping the passenger car lighting dim is far more realistic as far as I’m concerned. By using the 4 volt power supply in the baggage car I use a 2K pot in series with the supply voltage in each car to give me the option of controlling the brightness of each car individually.
I can tweak the brightness through the diaphragm on the lead end of each car using the blue 2KΩ 25 turn pot.
The current of each car is adjustable from 1ma to 5ma. Each car has between 6 to 10 LEDs for balanced lighting. I use 3mm warm white wide angle desperation LEDs for all of my passenger car lighting, the wide angle LEDs give the cars even lighting without any hot spots.
Ok so b/c this is my first crack at this effort, and I’m short on time b/c want something for the holidays and still finishing my layout, I’m going to look into making something similar to the Rapido Easy Peasys (thanks Ed), basically a few LEDs powered by battery and on/off with a magnetic switch.
I recently installed some walthers lighting into one of their heavyweights. I had to trim the bulkhead to accommodate it. Additionally, I like the idea of the the rapido battery powered lighting (and the wand for on/off) so I’ll be testing that soon.
