Part 6 Hiding the Wires

Hiding LEDs in attic and ceiling of main level:

I have wanted to light the interior of the shop and the attic without having obvious lights as the shop is supposed to be a 1920s era building. So I have set up some hidden lights.

These will be 3 volt LEDs (1.8mm), and each will have its own wires running to the power jack. I’ve also sanded the surface of these lights to avoid the spot-light effect.

Since these lights have arrived with 14" wires, I need to add extra wire in order to snake, via hidden pathways, them down to the power jack. To do this, I began underneath the building. I pushed a red and a black wire (from my spools of extra wire) up through the hole at the back (as shown before).

Hiding them presented something of a problem. Most shops I've ever been in have, in some corner, a stack of wood of various sizes. I made a piece for this set of wires out of channel trim. I glued two pieces of channel (looks like a 'u') trim together to form a hollow piece of wood to stand in the back corner.

I ran the wires all the way through this piece up to the edge of the attic, and then I attached the red wire to the red wire of my 1.8mm LED and the same with the black wires. (Am I boring you? Surely most of you could deduce this part, but for the advantage of some who cannot 'see' this, I'm explaining in detail.)

To connect these wires, one could solder them, but I believe they will be secure enough by simply being twisted together. I slid a piece of shrink tube over each, then twisted the LED red to the red from my spool. I did the same with the black wires. I slid the shrink tube over each twisted connection and held this over a candle flame until the tubing had shrunk over the connection making it pretty secure.

I then taped the wires in place, so I could measure the length. I cut the spool wire underneath the building and stripped about 1/3" of the insulation off the end of each wire. [see: Make wires shorter or longer, strip the wire!  http://www.modeltrainsoftware.com/video.html ] 

I tested the connection to make certain that the LED would light. Testing was simple. I held the bare end of the red wire against the positive side of a 3v. battery and the naked end of the black wire against the negative side of the same battery. Yay! That LED lit up.

Next, I put a piece of masking tape on those two wires and marked them as Right Attic and taped them to the bottom of the building. Using Aleene's Tack-it Over & Over (because I want to be able to change these LEDs if one of them should go bad), I glued the wires down along the top edge of the middle rafter and along the attic wall. These wires show, but I intend to paint them tan to blend with the wood and pile some junque in front of the wires to hide them. Every attic has some junk, right?

  

For the second attic light, I bared the ends of the spool-wire, this time before threading them up into the building. I'm learning. I followed the same proceedure. Here, however, I found that my shrink tube connection would end up inside of the channel trim and would not fit. Not wishing to waste the wire, I found a larger piece of channel trim.

In the picture below, you can see that one LED is installed and the second one is at the beginning of being installed. 

Just in case anyone would look in through the attic window, I painted over the wires with white paint. And this next photo shows the black and red wires before they were glued into the larger piece of channel trim.

Below, you can see the underside of the building where the wires to the first attic LED are waiting eventual connection to the power source and on/off switch. You can also see the second attic LED wires in preparation for their being glued down, and marked. 

I tested the new connection and found it worked, so glued and marked the second attic light.

====================================

My next effort will be to provide some indirect light for the main area of the shop. To accomplish this, I have made holes and grooves in the ceiling of the main floor.

Below, you can see the attic-floor/main-room’s ceiling lying on my work table waiting for my order to arrive. I have not yet decided how I will hide the wiring. I want the LEDs and wires to be removable in case the need should arise in the future.

Stay tuned for more.

Part 5 Constructing Fixtures - porch light

Constructing Fixtures 2

Making the porch light:

I need a porch light for this building, and I want it to be something like the drawing below. I’ve looked everywhere on the web for lamp parts that can be wired with LEDs and have finally decided that I need to make them myself.

First, I tried a paper cone. This is more difficult that it would seem. No one seems to have a water cooler with those paper cone drinking cups anymore. So I tried to make a paper cone. Each cone I made leaned ever so slightly off center even when drawn with drafting compass and ruler. I also drew the shape on the computer to get it absolutely symmetrical, but it still did not turn out to my liking.

Needless to say, I did not take pictures of these failures.

Next, I bought a ‘yard’ light which turned out to be too large (2 inches in diameter). I thought, oh well, I’ll just make a smaller item of similar shape inside this light. I made one from polyclay but when I baked it, it crumpled a bit and looks more like an old hat than the shade of a fixture.

Now I was frustrated because nothing was coming out like my drawing:

Part numbers in above drawing are JAR-JAF.com parts.

Then I had to stop this project because of the demands of my day job. I also had to go for my annual physical. While there, I asked the nurse if she had anything that looked like a cone and told her why I needed it. “I’ll ask,” she said very generously. When she came back into the room after the doc was finished with me, she gave me the item below:

 Above is the part I was interested in, so I brought it home and began by spraying it with Krylon Fusion, so I

could paint it after cutting it down.

I then drilled a hole in the base of the vial (or as it will 

end up) the top of the fixture shade.

  I've initially fit the parts of this fixture together. The wires run easily through the brass rod, but the 3 volt LED itself and its base connections do not fit well up in the new shade. I need a larger part for concealing the base of the LED, a ceiling plate, a metal top for the shade and paint.

I have ordered these from JAR-JAF.com.

While I wait, I will begin wiring some attic lights which will not have shades as they

will be hidden in the rafters.

I urge you to look at other sources for making fixtures like Kris’s blog

http://1inchminisbykris.blogspot.com/2010/11/november-project-lamp-shade-part-1.html

Stay Tuned... for when I get my order from JAR-JAF

Wow, I totally forgot to come back to this section. Here are photos of the finished porch fixture: 

Ready to be installed

In place but not yet glued as I still needed to check the wiring before gluing when the photo was taken

Part 5 Constructing Fixtures

Constructing fixtures and attaching them to the system.

I began with the ‘fire’ in the pot belly stove:

Above is a photo of the pot-belly stove partially assembled. This is a Chrysnbon kit made of plastic and has wonderful detail. With LEDs there is no need to worry that the heat of a bulb will warp the stove.

The Base and ash collector body have holes in the bottom through which the wires are run. They exit the structure beneath and then will run out behind and through the hole in the floor in order to connect the black wires to one side of the switch and the red wires to the red wire which exits the power jack.

These are fuzzy photos, but show how the body of the stove fits over the fire lights, which will flicker.

I will be using museum wax rather than glue [recently discovered Aleene's Tack-it Over & Over] to attach the body of the stove to the base & ash collector body, so I can take these apart to replace LEDs or fix wires later, should the need arise. And no matter how long LEDs last, if you have constructed a scene or mini building that you want to keep for many years, think about that future 10 years down the road. How will you replace these lights?

All my connections will not be glued but stuck down with temporary sticky-whatever.

   

The stove pipe will be 'glued' (with sticky-stuff of one form or another) in place when I am ready to set the stove in its final position.

Since I put the pot-belly stove together before discovering that I could install a system without those pesky resistors, I was concerned about whether the 3-light fire set would still work with the new 3v adapter.

The answer was a very lovely yes “the fire will work just fine with 3 volts; no need for a separate supply” so I finished the assembly and placed the stove to see how it all looked.

This photo shows the stove in place against the rough wall of the interior of the shop.

I actually placed this little stove at first on the most visible wall of the shop. The flickering fire would have shown nicely there. However, I came across an external stove pipe and really wanted it on my building. That external pipe had to be on the wall that did not have porch roof as it was too short to go above the porch roof, so I had to place the stove facing sideways where the flame won’t be as visible. Still the flame can be seen.

Part 4 -- Getting the Correct LED Set-up

I got my initial order of adapter and LEDs but now have discovered that what I ordered and received presented problems. (There's a better way)

One of the problems I encountered along the way was the difference in size and shape of LEDs and regular incandescent dollhouse lighting.

Take a look at: http://www.modeltrainsoftware.com/miniatureleds.html

These wonderful warm-white lights are bright and closely match incandescents in color. However, they present some difficulties for the dollhouse miniaturist.

1.) In the picture above, you will see a bump under the shrink tube on the red wire of each LED. This is difficult to fit into an ordinary dollhouse 1" to 12" scale lamp. When you order LEDs, you can ask (at the modeltrainsoftware site) Shelly to place the resistor farther down on the red wire.

(Above) When rewiring the dollhouse size lamp (which I got out of a junk box at an estate sale), I needed the resistor placed a good 4" away from the LED, so it could be hidden behind the table where the lamp sits. I later painted the red wire black, so it mimicked old original 1920s wires which were black.

2.) Fitting LEDs into the holes in beads or brass rods is also a problem. A fixture meant to hold incandescent dollhouse lights often has delicately curved (hollow) brass rods where small wiring easily fits through, but not easily negotiated by the post at the base of most LEDs even though those posts can be bent. 

For this, you may need to order the tiny chip LEDs.

http://www.modeltrainsoftware.com/smd-chip-leds.html

3.) LEDs are directional. This means that the light is produced by electrons flowing in one direction. So + (positive) and – (negative) matters. That means every LED needs two wires. I wondered how I was going to make the two wires into one where they show (as in the wires which exit a lamp fixture). Again, here the tiny wires and chip LEDs are the answer.
      You can glue the two wires flat together to mimic the lamp wires of old.

4.) The light from the LED shines forward more than out to the sides, so they are perfect for can lighting and are often used that way. You will get a focused beam on your subject. Sometimes you will want this direct light, but sometimes you'll need a more diffused light. To achieve a diffuse effect, the LED's surface can be sanded with sand paper.

5.) Another way to get the light from an LED to diffuse is to hide the LED inside frosted glass or other structures because they do not look like 'bulbs' or candle flames.

But have faith, there is a solution to all of these problems:

Shelly wrote me this when I showed her the above account of my experience:

1) If you use our new ( http://www.modeltrainsoftware.com/3-volt-adapter.html ) 3 volt adapter, there is no longer any need for resistors!

or, consider the 2-AA or 2-AAA or coin cell approach. All 3 volt supplies have no resistor on the warm white LEDs.

[Caution] Most 12V power supplies that come with doll house kits are actually 12 volt AC and will irreparably damage LEDs.

For those with 'existing' power, usually Cir Kit or others, we recommend our ( http://www.modeltrainsoftware.com/bl-212.html ) 12-18v AC/DC power lights. While they are bulkier, the bump is farther away from the bulb. We even have them with the bump much farther away, here: http://www.modeltrainsoftware.com/led-longer-wire.html

2) Regarding the size/shape -- I guess that is why the chip LEDs have become extremely popular for lamps in all scales.

http://www.modeltrainsoftware.com/smd-chip-leds.html

http://www.modeltrainsoftware.com/nano-smd-leds.html

If you go to both of those pages and scroll down, you will see that chips have been used with great success in LAMPS!!!  These are customer photos of lamps made with both the chip, and the nano chip.

Fortunately, Shelly was happy to exchange my 12v adapter and the ten lights-with-resistors which I had originally ordered. I will soon receive a 3v adapter and ten LEDs with no resistors. Yay!






PART 3 -- Putting the Plan to Work

My Order Has Arrived

Below are pictures of what I got from www.modeltrainsoftware.com plus what I already had. The ruler is in photo to show size relations.

I already had some shrink tubing and the flickering fire kit for the pot-belly stove. The adapter, power jack, switch and ten lights are new. Now I had to plan where I wanted all of this stuff to go.

So far, I have only put together the 3 walls on the foundation and finished the foundation outside with faux stone. The underside of this building has a very nice hollow space for my wiring, but I will need to do my soldering of wires with the building on its side, so I won’t finish all of the outside until the wiring is complete.

I began by drilling a small nail sized hole in the back left corner of my building’s floor.

[Note: later I realized that I also need a larger hole along the left side wall where the faux stone backing for the pot-belly stove will be. Fortunately, I installed a false floor, not glued down when I discovered the need for the added hole. A lot of problems can be eliminated if one builds a false interior: walls, floors, and ceiling.]

In this building, there is an attic. The floor to the attic slides into slots in the left and right wall (as seen when looking into the open side of the cottage). I want to always be able to move this floor in and out in order to make working on the interior easier. Hence, I plan to run the wires from the porch fixture through a hole in the porch roof, into the floor slot, along the top of the wall and down to the hole.

The photo below is taken at a later stage of this project. The red/black lines show where the porch light's wires will be placed.

(Please ignore the crooked piece under the window. It will be hidden. Pixies came and moved it in the night while the glue was drying. <grin>)

Planning really is important, but I've kept my options open!

The first actual installation is the power jack and hole for a switch.

  

Here is the finished installation of the power jack and switch.

=========================

Below is my first plan for wiring this project, but I learned as the building progressed that I really only needed to decide where I wanted the power jack and switch. I include the first plan here, so you can see how much changed as I began to complete the structure and saw much better places for LEDs and better hiding places to run the wiring.

So here is what I wrote back then:

Basically the power will come in to the base of the structure via a power jack placed in the far left corner behind where the pot-belly stove will be. [I later changed the location of pot-belly stove]

Think phone jack or the way you connect some laptop computers to a power cord.

From there the positive wire (red) runs up through a tiny hole in the floor. The negative wire (black) runs along the base up to near the 'open' end of the shop where it will be connected to the switch. The switch will be near where it is easy to reach instead of at the back of the building.

The switch has a black wire that leads into it from the power jack and one that exits from it. That is where the black wire from the LED attaches.

First, I will attach the pot-belly stove flickering lights to the power red and black. Next, I'll build my porch light and run a red and black wire all the way back down to the connection behind the pot-belly stove and hook it in.

I'll do the same with every other light. Each will have its own black and red wire running back to the connection behind the pot belly stove. I haven't thought through how I will hide all of these wires, but there will be plenty of places behind the bare studs of the interior.

 

Boy, have things changed!

You did not need to know all of the above, but I thought it might help you to feel better about attempting this LED wiring stuff if you knew that I had stumbled around a lot with this project. Of course, I continued to ask questions of experts while building.

Now I know that this wiring is much simpler than I had originally thought. All I need to do is decide where I want an LED installed, install it, and then run the wires back down to the wires underneath the building. I can add more lights if I wish!

Yes, that is correct. Each light will have a black and a red wire running from the LED down through a hole to the underside of the building. The only thing I must deal with is where to hide those wires. No circuits, as long as there are fewer than 50 LED bulbs.

Soldering Guide for LEDs

[While you do not have to solder your wiring, here are directions in case you want to solder]

Soldering is a process in which two or more metal items are joined together by melting and flowing a filler metal into the joint, the filler metal having a lower melting point than the workpiece. Soldering differs from welding in that the workpieces are not melted. There are three forms of soldering, each requiring higher temperatures and each producing an increasingly stronger joint strength:

• soft soldering, which originally used a tin-lead alloy as the filler metal
• silver soldering, which uses an alloy containing silver
• blazing, which uses a brass alloy for the filler.

The alloy of the filler metal for each type of soldering can be adjusted to modify the melting temperature of the filler. Soldering appears to be a hot glue process, but it differs from gluing significantly in that the filler metals alloy with the workpiece at the junction to form a gas-tight and liquid-tight bond.

Soft soldering is characterized by having a melting point of the filler metal below approximately 400 °C (752 °F), whereas silver soldering and brazing use higher temperatures, typically requiring a flame or carbon arc torch to achieve the melting of the filler. Soft solder filler metals are typically alloys (often containing lead) that melt at temperatures below 350°C/662°F.

In the soldering process, heat is applied to the parts to be joined, causing the solder to melt and to bond to the workpieces in an alloying process called wetting. In stranded wire, the solder is drawn up into the wire by capillary action in a process called wicking. Capillary action also takes place when the workpieces are very close together or touching. The joint strength is dependent on the filler metal used, where soft solder is the weakest and the brass alloy used for brazing is the strongest. Soldering, which uses metal to join metal in a molecular bond has electrical conductivity and is water-tight and gas-tight.

Equipment:

1) How many different types of soldering irons are there and which are ones to avoid when soldering small wires?

There are hundreds of kinds of soldering irons on the market:

·      small craft sized irons sometimes called "pencil irons" sold at Home Depot, Radio Shack, Hobby Lobby, Michaels, etc. are cheap and easy to use.

·      larger "heavy duty" irons (get a lot hotter than is good for LEDs

·      ESD Digital Regulated iron

                                                      ESD stands for Electrostatic Sensitive Device. Regulated means you can set the temp accurately. This type of iron is best for use when soldering wires onto an LED. LEDs are heat + discharge sensitive. (This does not mean that an ESD is necessary for the wires, only for work on the diode itself. That is why having the wires and resistors already done for you is so nice.)

I own an ancient soldering iron which gets hotter the longer it is on. For soldering of wires at the connection points: I can use my old iron, but I’ve found I need a light touch, usually soldering and then unplugging the iron, plugging it in and making the next solder, etc.

Anyone who already has the "pencil iron" can use this. However, if you intend to do lots of wiring, think about the ESD iron.

2) Is it necessary to solder on a particular surface, or is there a surface

you would recommend?

Soldering surface can be as little as a piece of cardboard or as much as a ceramic tile. Cardboard can be changed often, giving a clean surface for work. Take a look at the wire stripping video. http://www.modeltrainsoftware.com/kynarwire.html  Scroll down to the second item on the page to see video. She was using a paper towel.

3) What sort of solder do you recommend?

 I get "benzomatic" at Home Depot in the tools area. It comes in a small cheap roll. It has 40% rosin core (flux already inside of it) and is a lead-tin type, which sticks better than non-lead. I researched lead in solder and safety concerns. The lead does not become airborne when you heat the solder. The flux is what is in the smoke you see. The lead stays inside the solder itself. So if you wash your hands and avoid eating or smoking or touching your eyes or nose while soldering, you will not ingest any lead!

4)I like the idea of the flux in the solder, but why is flux necessary?

Flux is a reducing agent designed to return oxidized metals to their metallic state. Rosin Flux makes the solder "stick" better by etching the metal a bit. It ‘seals’ the metal connection and prevents future oxidization and thus improves the electrical connection and mechanical strength. The two principal types of flux are acid flux, used for metal mending and plumbing and rosin flux used in electronics.

Steps in Soldering:

• bare about 1/3 inch of each wire to be connected

·      slide shrink insulation piece onto one side of wires to be connected and away from soldering area

• lay together the wires which are to be connected
• solder them by holding the solder near the wires and heating it with the soldering iron
• cool a minute
• give a little tug to make sure solder is solid
• slide shrink insulation over the connection
• hold shrink insulation over a lit match in order to shrink it tightly onto the connected wires

See a soldering video here: http://www.modeltrainsoftware.com/soldering.html