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Hi All,
Just in the process of building my first ever MSE semaphore signal kit and will be electrifying the lamp via an LED to make it operate.
As such I appear to have a couple of options concerning the wiring.
I was originally planning on hiding one wire down the middle of the tubular post which is easy to do and making the rest of the signal live and that would be the + and - I would need to power the LED. If using a lightly filed shaped and painted 1.8mm mini or panel dot type from DCC Concepts I was planning on using one of the legs to form the lamp bracket and solder it directly to the post meaning just one wire needed to be run through the tube.
No real problems there except the drilling of the hole in the side of the tube to accept the wire but all quite achievable really.
I was wondering though, when I make my white metal cast "timber post" signals then this is not really an option and the wire would need to be run down the outside of the signal post.
Then I actually saw signal posts that did have a cable in real life running up the post, probably to power the lamp in later days 1930s on perhaps? and as such I am wondering if it would be more prototypical to actually run the cable neatly up the post and secure with a dot of superglue (CA) here and there. If so should I paint the cable all one colour, use the colour insulation to match prototypical cable colours, assume a conduit was used to run the cable, or what??
By the way I am using the nice single strand 30swg or 0.25mm diameter wire with insulation making it 0.5mm in total or a scale size of 1.5" in diameter, not a totally ludicrous size if it was considered to be a scale conduit however I could strip all the insulation off it and use it bare, against a well painted post for insulation purposes, painted black or appropriate weathered colours, giving a scale size of 19mm - all very realistic I would have thought for a conduit diameter.
Thoughts, comments, suggestions, ideas please.
Just in the process of building my first ever MSE semaphore signal kit and will be electrifying the lamp via an LED to make it operate.
As such I appear to have a couple of options concerning the wiring.
I was originally planning on hiding one wire down the middle of the tubular post which is easy to do and making the rest of the signal live and that would be the + and - I would need to power the LED. If using a lightly filed shaped and painted 1.8mm mini or panel dot type from DCC Concepts I was planning on using one of the legs to form the lamp bracket and solder it directly to the post meaning just one wire needed to be run through the tube.
No real problems there except the drilling of the hole in the side of the tube to accept the wire but all quite achievable really.
I was wondering though, when I make my white metal cast "timber post" signals then this is not really an option and the wire would need to be run down the outside of the signal post.
Then I actually saw signal posts that did have a cable in real life running up the post, probably to power the lamp in later days 1930s on perhaps? and as such I am wondering if it would be more prototypical to actually run the cable neatly up the post and secure with a dot of superglue (CA) here and there. If so should I paint the cable all one colour, use the colour insulation to match prototypical cable colours, assume a conduit was used to run the cable, or what??
By the way I am using the nice single strand 30swg or 0.25mm diameter wire with insulation making it 0.5mm in total or a scale size of 1.5" in diameter, not a totally ludicrous size if it was considered to be a scale conduit however I could strip all the insulation off it and use it bare, against a well painted post for insulation purposes, painted black or appropriate weathered colours, giving a scale size of 19mm - all very realistic I would have thought for a conduit diameter.
Thoughts, comments, suggestions, ideas please.