Hi, All,
As if I don't have enough to keep me busy with writing this blog, a model rocketry blog, and a woodworking blog, I've embarked on yet another keyboard-tickling venture that covers all of my other many and varied interests:
"Eddie's Random Ramblings"
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Cheers!
(Note: This entry was started well before Christmas. I'm just now getting around to posting it.)
I happen to have acquired one of last year's special sets that LEGO gave away when one purchased a certain dollar amount of product.
This is the "Charles Dickens 'A Christmas Carol'" set #40410.
The vignette features two parts separated by a wall section: an interior scene featuring minifigs of Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim, and an outdoor section with Ebenezer Scrooge peering through the door window. All of this is built atop a well-designed, brick-built book.
One look at the set convinced me that this was a perfect candidate for LED lighting.
It's all there - a fireplace, candles, lantern, and street lamp.
An even more delightful discovery was the presence of a slide out 'secret' compartment built into the book base.
Perfect for housing the battery and electronics.
I won't dwell too much on the set build process in favor of highlighting changes necessary for lighting installation.
My first change is this: many of the internal parts used to fashion the drawer were in earth tone colors that I would find useful in other MOCs, so I replaced them with lesser used colors (like pink) from my parts stash.
For the lighting, I started with the street lamp. The flagpole element that serves as the lamp post was replaced by a stack of black 1x1 round bricks to facilitate running wires up the center. A 3mm white LED fits nicely inside the clear lamp glass. A small hole was drilled through the plate stud on which the lamp is attached, allowing the wiring to be routed into the base below.
Some of you LEGO purists will likely wince at the thought of drilling holes in any part. So do I, but for this build I deemed it necessary because I want no visible wiring showing in this set. The vignette will likely never be taken apart, so a few permanently altered elements are not going to be a big deal.
Scrooge's lantern - same idea. A yellow LED was fitted inside the clear lamp element. Again, a hole was drilled through the base plate for wire routing.
Next was the fireplace. Originally, the flames were represented by standard 'flame' elements. In order to light up the feature, I replaced these with a trans clear orange 1x2 brick topped by a trans orange 1x1 cone and a trans orange 1x1 plate. A red LED was mounted inside the brick. This picture comes out too bright to show the details, but in real life the fireplace looks really nice.
I made an attempt to also light up the candles atop the fireplace mantel, but I ran into an interesting problem, made apparent after modifying the fireplace side bricks and installing LEDs. The candles illuminated, but so did the bricks that define the side of the fireplace. Not good.
So, I removed the wiring and restored the fireplace structure to its original form. Since I was no longer going to illuminate the candles, I removed them altogether from the build. Perhaps in the near future, I will re-visit this problem and find a way to insulate the inside of the tan fireplace bricks so that they don't glow from inside.
Here is a picture of the electronics mounted inside the pull out 'hidden' drawer:
Each LED circuit has its own limiting resistor. Power is from a 3.3 volt button battery wired to a miniature switch that runs everything. All the wiring exits the back of the drawer and is routed to the various locations.
One final mod I made to the set was purely an aesthetic one. The pine trees located on the interior and exterior of the scene were built up from small green wedge plates. They looked cheesy. I happened to have a couple of small pine tree elements in my 'flora and fauna' parts box that proved to be fine replacements.
