MWaz Get off your duff challenge

[twilight]

Recently was able to get the brake shoes on the engineer's side.


That's my mother-in-laws earrings in the foam cradle. They're in for a repair job.

And incidentally, I gave this glue a whirl for securing the brake shoes in place and it worked pretty well.



Was able to do some work on the head light this morning.


Head light is from Cal Scale (190-477) with a hole drilled out the back to allow the LED leads to pass through. Inside headlight is painted silver. Brunswick green on the outside.

I use Minitronics LEDs. I like the Yeloglo version.


And I used TCS 30 AWG wire with correct colors for the front headlight.


When I install the LED in the head light (when I remember) I install the anode side of the LED on the right when looking down on the headlight. The anode is the positive side and is the longer lead. The blue wire will get connected on the anode, white on the cathode.


And a little test to check if everything is working.


LEDs only working in one direction. If the positive is connected to the cathode the LED will not work and could be damaged. If the LED is connected correctly and to much voltage is applied it will also be damaged.

Here is the headlight in place on the smokebox. Some H-9 boilers(Bowser's E-6 was the same boiler) will have a hole already drilled for the headlight leads. This one I had to drill myself.


I run the wires through some styrene tubing and solder it to a male end of Minitronics 2 pin connector (part# 50-001-02).


The female side of the Miniatronics connector is soldered to the respective leads on the decoder (installed in tender) for the front head light. The 3.9K resistor is solder in series with the blue lead from decoder. I will be changing the resistor to 4.7k because I think the headlight is to bright. I just ordered 4.7k resistors to do that and when I finish off the tender side of build I'll swap it out.


Now a unfortunate mishap happened when I was installing the styrene tubing. I used accelerator on the CA to glue the tubing in place and some leaked out on the finish side of boiler crazing the paint.


So, I'll have to come up with some way to repair that. Locomotive will be heavily weathered when done so hopefully after the accelerator dries the paint won't flake off like it already has.