I recently picked up- at Michaels Crafts- a small card of light red and dark red adhesive rhinestones in various sizes (2mm/ 3mm/5mm diameters), which I have been using for safety lights on several car projects- safety lamps at each end of a caboose/ etc. They are found in the “Letters and Appliques” aisle, under the brand name “Recollections”. Very inexpensive!. As the adhesive is not very strong, I use CA to glue them to painted surfaces. The available light enables them to show quite well. There are clear (white) and other colors available, as well- they are great for simulated light lenses where running electrified LEDs is hard to do.
Hope this tip helps…
Cedarwoodron
Are these the ones you are talking about (link)?
Simulating lights with jewels has been around a long time - I remember as a kid having some old-fashion 2-aspect pedestal mounted traffic light, metal (alloy forms? I don’t remember). Anyway, it used tiny jewels which as a kid I had to glue in using white glue (late 1970s - around the time when that guy in the commercial first crazy-glued his hard-hat to that girder, and a semi-reliable, somewhat affordable way was introduced commercially to glue lots of disparate materials together).
I think Bachmann had transparent color plastic “gems” for it’s various signals and lights…
Supplies are where you find them. My wife goes to the nail salon every so often. Often the will affix shiney little baubels that in a week or more will come off, but she saves them for me. They are perfect for HO headlights!
One more way she justifies getting her nails “professionally” done.[;)]
As was stated earlier, this technique has been around for years, and years. MDC used to provide these “jewels” in their loco and caboose kits, as did Athearn with their BW cabooses.
Chutton- right brand, but wrong package. Mine have a bar code number of 00100 81447 (yours are multi-color; mine are three-sized light and dark reds only).
My posting is to alert hands-on modelers to an item which may be of use in current benchwork projects. I am well aware that this is an old technique (faux cut crystal shapes), probably dating back to the era of “paste” artificial jewelry in the early 20th century.
I am just glad that (in a plastic material form) the idea is still around at a cost that makes them useful for modeling!
Cedarwoodron
Fair enough, I only did a prefunctatory search on the items.
Now, my question is are the rhinestones faceted, or are they round (like the Recollections enamel dot stickers linked to from the etsy page I posted). I ask because I never liked the rather obvious facets in those glue-in-jewels; in general blubs have a rounded form - even nowadays with all sort of funky form factors for spotlights, headlights, marker-lights, warning lights, they tend toward a rounded form. Any sort of faceted bulbs I can think of are kind of Kitschy display blubs or art pieces, not really for industrial/commerical/transporation usage.
Faceted, but in a very rounded hemispherical way. The paper (adhesive) inside is silvered, to create light reflection thru the colored plastic. The 2mm ones I recently used on a caboose at each end of the platform look rounded from a slight distance and easily pass the 3 foot rule!
Cedarwoodron