Best Of Keystone Customs announces Angled numberboards for your SW Diesels

[tehachapifan]

...Nice looking overall SW progress shot Russ.
...and that numberboard on 2873 looks awesome (save further on that for another time).
Jeff

Thanks! I am happy with how those boards came out too.

@sp org div ,

As I understand it @tehachapifan will be adding some brass strip down to the body.....

That was my original plan but since I decided to keep the center post for mounting, I think I'll make some legs out of styrene now that are more for looks than actual support.

[Lemosteam]

Second try I put the LED to one side, and also threaded the fiber optic strand into the opening, then I mushroomed the opposite end, pulled the mushroomed end into the recess in the numberboard, and the snipped off the excess inside the opening. The LED now lights the fiber optic really well.

I filled the housing with a clear glue and while the glue was still tacky, I added the styrene, which is 0.010" thick, 0.18 wide strip, cut off at 0.053". Small filing on the corners and the piece drops onto the clear glue.

[tehachapifan]

Marker light looks great! Still waiting on some 0403's to arrive to install in mine.

[Lemosteam]

So now for what I think might be the best option, suggested by @peteski :

This time I glued the LED facing away from the styrene, fiber optic the same, clear glue then styrene.

[peteski]

Looking good guys!  BTW, Russ, there are no 0403 LEDs - only 0402.  Probably a typo. 

I was thinking of using clear glue with talcum powder mixed in as a light diffusing medium, but looking at the last test install I don't think it is needed.

[tehachapifan]

Looks great!

Looking good guys!  BTW, Russ, there are no 0403 LEDs - only 0402.  Probably a typo.  ....

More like a brain &%$# but, yeah, 0402 is what I meant.

[tehachapifan]

As posted in Weekens Update, here's a couple of pics of mine installed and operating on my SP SW1200

[Lemosteam]

@tehachapifan , that looks excellent. 

Details please,  what did you use for the decal, light board behind it and where did you decide to place the LED?  What resistor value did you use?

Inquiring minds (me) want to know!

[tehachapifan]

Thanks, John!

I used white styrene for the window but ended up using .010 thick instead of .005 by mistake. It still looks good but, if you look real close, you can see it's a bit too thick for the opening...but it's not too bad. For the numbers themselves, I used Microscale's numberboard decals with white backing. My batch is getting a bit old (plus I probably need to store my decals better) as they would start to disintegrate a little with continued positioning, so I couldn't fuss with aligning them too long. They came out OK but they could've been positioned a little better with fewer gaps and holes. I may try to fill with more black paint if I start to feel brave and steady enough . For the LED's, I followed your recommendation and installed a single, pre-wired 0403 SMD LED facing the rear and in the middle of the opening and I used a 63K resistor for numberboards. I always get series and parallel a little confused when just using those terms (I'm more visual), but I have the one resistor hooked to both the numberboard LED's and they're not daisy-chained (make sense?). Not sure this was the best method but it seems to be working OK at the moment. Even with the 63K resistor, it still took a few coats of black paint on the non-illuminated surfaces to eliminate light bleed-thru. The marker lenses were made from fiber optic strands. The lens end of the fiber optic strands were mushroomed by briefly holding an end of the strand near a soldering iron. The thinnest fiber optic strand I had on-hand was still a bit too thick to curve the tail towards the LED like you did, so the marker lights don't illuminate very bright. The markers are not glued in, so I may try to replace them at some point with thinner strands. Overall, I'm extremely pleased with how these turned out!

[Lemosteam]

Thanks Russ.  I pulled my fiber optic strand from a multi-strand piece. One thing I did to feed it through the hole and into the housing was use a drill to drill the printed hole toward the center of the housing. Then a small bend at the very end of the strand allowed me to work it around the corner and into the opening.

[tehachapifan]

Ah, that makes sense! I may have to give that a try at some point, although I did also run a .008 wire thru the bottom and into the housing on that end to have a way to attach that end to the loco shell (I really wanted these things to be sturdy, being in such a vulnerable spot when handling the loco). Because of this, I may have blocked too much of the internal opening for the marker light to illuminate much more, but perhaps not.

[peteski]

Russ, where did you find SMD 0403 LEDs?!  LOL, you did it again. It is 0402. 
Also, 63k is an unusual value for a resistor.  I would have expected 56, 62, or 68 k. Maybe you did the same thing you did with the LED size and you typed in "3" instead of a "2"? Also, are you sure it is 63 (62) k ohm and not 6.3 (6.2) k ohm?  What you mentioned seems a bit high (but then again those white LEDs are quite efficient, so maybe I shouldn't be questioning your info). 

[coosvalley]

As posted in Weekens Update, here's a couple of pics of mine installed and operating on my SP SW1200

Very nice loco!..I especially like the MU hoses tucked into the pilot...

[tehachapifan]

Thanks, coosvalley!

Peteski, you got me on the LED size again (don't know why I keep doing that ). Also, looking a little closer, the end wrapper for these resistors may actually say 68k, although half the 8 apparently didn't print. These were part of a resistor kit I purchased some time ago and there's all sorts of different values included.

[peteski]

Thanks, coosvalley!

Peteski, you got me on the LED size again (don't know why I keep doing that ). Also, looking a little closer, the end wrapper for these resistors may actually say 68k, although half the 8 apparently didn't print. These were part of a resistor kit I purchased some time ago and there's all sorts of different values included.

Do you happen to know the marking on those resistors (either color stripes or numbers on them)?  Sorry for the 3rd degree - I'm just curious.  I feel like Lt. Colombo! 

A 68k leaded resistor would have blue, gray, orange, and gold stripes (or "683" on SMD resistor). A 6.8k resistor would have blue, gray, red, and gold stripes (or "682" on SMD resistor)

Your loco looks great! I first saw the photo in the Weekend Update thread. Really nice job on the illuminated number boards.