BS-75: Engines part 01

OK, once more, let me remind you that this is a exploratory blog and nothing is definite. Its just to give you an idea on what you can do with your own model kit.

Now, lets get to the other part, which are the engines. I can never decide if they are white or blue. This is because for LEDs, you either have pure white, bluish white or yellowish white. So, in this matter, I decided to go with just white and paint them blue later if I want. That is the beauty of using White LEDs because you can paint them in any transparent colour you want later on. This is very important because there are some LEDs such as yellow and especially green, which suck up so much current and still glow. So, you just put a white LED in there and paint it transparent green.

This is one of the four outer engines pods and it only consist of four parts.

Again, you have to remove these 'pillars'. Really. I am not fooled that easily now. Heh.

With the two halves closed, you have the third part, which I call it the funnel for the moment, OK? So, with the two halves of the pods closed, there is no through hole to put the wires through to the LED. So, you have to drill a hole for it. Even a 2mm or 3mm hole would do. If you want, you can line up the hole with the transparent dimple so that the 3mm White LED will sit flush on the other side of the engine pod with its legs still intact.

This is the funnel fitted with the clear part. The round area is what it would call the 'dimple', OK?

And just for fun, I wrapped the insides of the funnel with aluminium tape. Unfortunately, the only aluminium tape I had was much thicker. And so, I had to use something stronger than toothpicks to make sure they cover all the tight corners. Unfortunately, the Satay stall has not opened for business yet.

OK, you can see how bright the LED is. And you can see how it lit up the dimple. The problem with LEDs are that they have a very narrow viewing angle. If you look at it head-on, its bright. But the moment you look at it from another angle, its not that bright. So, this is the effect wehn you put the LED right next to the clear part.

Remember the aligned hole I talked about earlier? Let's put the LED BEHIND it. Now, the gap between the clear part and the LED has increased.

Let's light it up again. OK, it looks nicer, as if there are a lot of 'details' inside the engine. But if you look head-on, the dimple is still bright, which is good. So, I presume this is the same for the other two lower pods but looking at the parts still in the sprues, there is no blacked area for you to drill a hole to. So, you might want to use some scrap plastic sheets. The alignment of the LED to the dimple, I must say, is very important.

Next are the middle engines. This is is a single clear part and well, you would have to use some scrap plastic sheets to to separate all the LEDs inside.

This is a small test circuit I made earlier and its about the right size. However, because I am not using the correct resistors sizes, they do get HOT after a few minutes. This is because 12 volts is a lot of power and limiting it to just 3 volts means a lot of energy will be given of (as heat). So, I will have to get the actual resistors next week once my salary is in, of course. Because of the engine, I am starting to consider using lower voltage but this would also mean other problems, mainly I would have to custom build the White LED lights int he landing bay instead of using the LED strips.

This is supposed to be a very simple lighting exercise using minimum components but now, using 12 volts seems a bit too much. why i chose 12 volts is because over here, it is a very 'common' voltage for devices such as CCTVs, auto-gates, alarms, and so on. This means the wall adaptors would be easy to come by. Anyway, I have to think more about this.

Coming back to the engines, the design of the kit is perfect because it has the space for you to put in a circuit board and with the help of the engine pods which you can use as a backing, they will give you the wanted gap.

This little circuit can run for about 5 minutes or so before getting hot. And I mean, really hot. I was so hot, I can smell the resin in the board cooking. Imagine what would have happened if someone stole this circuit and put it into their PLASTIC Battlestar Galactics model kit........