With all the detail I was putting into the cable and quarter decks, I knew that with normal lighting, no one would be able to see said detail. So, I decided to do my first LED lighting add-on. But, I get ahead of myself.
Using the Hatton book, I tried to follow the plans. Initially, this meant replacing the kit’s cabledeck with a styrene deck that actually covered the entire space.
A lot of fiddling was required so that it would lie flat and below the cutouts. With the template in hand, I drilled out the anchor runs and then cut wood decking to go over my styrene deck. The wood deck vendor, scaledecks.com, recommended painting the styrene before gluing down the thin paper to avoid any bleed through of the underlying white.
A similar process was done for the quarterdeck.
Above are a couple of views of the start and finish of the detailing. Anchor runs, bollards, compartments, winches, cable reels, signal guns (scratch-built), and miscellany are all included as I mostly followed the Hatton plan. You can also see the L’Arsenal anchor chain I used.
Here is the quarterdeck (the brace is there for strength — except the first one I used was too long so I spliced a new one. Ugly, but it won’t be seen once the deck is on).
And some detail of scale with 1/400 crew..
Here are both decks installed:
You can see the deck ceilings have been detailed as well (they are lying amidships).
Now, time to light up. I found a great resource on LED lighting for model ships and decided that I only needed two LEDs – one for the cable deck and one for the quarterdeck. The circuit would be series, not parallel. There was no way I could replace a bulb if it went out (as it would be beneath the flight deck) regardless of the wiring approach so series was good enough.
I purchased wiring, shrink tubing, and LED lights from Evan Designs. They provided all the specs on forward voltage ratings of each bulb so I could calculate the necessary resistor (purchased from Radio Shack – they probably hadn’t had anyone come in and buy resistors since 1990 – sadly, they are now bankrupt).
Where to put the bulb? I decided that to avoid being obtrusive, I would mount the bulb from above and towards the hull center for each deck. I cutout a styrene ceiling for each deck that would avoid light bleed-through. Here is the one for the quarterdeck:
The trick would be whether there would be enough or too much light upon the interior details. Step Zero was to verify that my circuit even worked. All systems go!
Step One involved soldering all the wires to LEDs and then protecting the joints with shrink wrap tubing. I used a heat gun to do this but carefully shielded the model with card board to avoid the heat gun melting the ship!
Step Two was to see if there would be adequate light given the location of the holes I had cut into the deck’s ceiling. I had to think about how far into the hole would I extend the bulb, if at all.
The picture on the left is before illumination. Sure is dark in there. The picture on the right is based on the initial test of placing the bulb atop the cutout hole. Note I haven’t secured the ceiling yet, just tacked it in place. Hmm. still a bit too dark.
I tried again, this time placing the bulb deeper into the cutout. The first picture is unlit, then the latter two are with the switch turned on. Too bright I would say – looks like a super nova exploded nearby.
To split the difference, I decided to paint the bulb with a thin light color to cut down on the lumens. This worked well.
I then secured the wiring, running it through the keel (previously prepared for this) and retested to make sure I hadn’t broken any of the delicate fine gauge wires.
Cropredy Illustrious Project 