Fibre Optics in a model

[spanner570]

It would only be turned on once in a blue moon lol

Al', off subject a bit , this sounds like my missus!

[Guest]

It’s now tomorrow morning, and I’ve found the thing I wanted to post:

http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/topic/145792-singing-and-dancing-land-raider/

That’s a thread I posted in 2008 on a Warhammer 40,000 forum about a Land Raider I had equipped with a light-and-sound show: an MP3 player with speakers, plus blinking and continually on LEDs, the former lighting up the exterior through fibre-optics. (Note that I had to disable my adblocker to get that site to load images.)

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Check the thread for a thorough description, but the basics of it are that I bought some blinking LEDs and soldered them together with some resistors (again, see the thread for how to calculate what you need) into this circuit:

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You can ignore the bit on the left with the MP3 player and amplifier, of course. It all looks like this in the flesh:

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For the fibre-optics themselves, I used a cheap TOSLINK cable I bought at an electrics store:

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On the left is the normal plug that’s at both ends of the cable, on the right is a piece I cut off and stripped. Initially I wanted to leave the black covering on it, but decided to remove it because it made the cable much thicker and less flexible. Inside the model, I put everything together like this:

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I drilled holes into the sides of bits of plastic tube and glued them into the model, then inserted the fibre-optics. The LEDs sit inside the pieces of tube:

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Here’s the model with the power off and on:

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The fibre-optics stick out from the side of the model so that I could paint the vehicle without having to mask 1 mm diameter lights: I just painted right over them and when I was done, trimmed the fibre-optics back to sit flush with the sides of the model.