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Post apocalyptic road ralley thread, with many examples?

You could use a 556 chip - two separate 555's in one little plastic bug. Or the CMOS equivalent to save much power.

You might ask the railroad guys. I think I've seen books on "Make your own Foliage" in the RR sections. They sometimes need a lot of trees for a layout so they've got the system pretty well worked out.

G'Luck!

Hi, Mike! Check out the entries in the current "To the Moon!" contest. Some of the entrants tell how they made their Lunar Surfaces.

A friend of mine bought several sets of resin material from Micro-Mark, and each had problems. It may be that MM lets it's resin sit on the shelf too long to begin with - it had begun to separate even just after my friend bought it. Add a year on YOUR shelf... I think MM uses Smooth-On, so I'd try a...

I've been using the 4060 chip for double blinking beacons for years. One chip, one cap, one resistor. Also quad blinks, and others. (Just make sure you do NOT get teeny tiny surface mount chips, use 'through hole' ones, much easier to work with.) The "Heart Sizzle" is a double strobe blink...

I always wanted physical models of things there were no kits of. Then again, that was even before Lindberg released their UFO the first time. So I scratchbuilt stuff using whatever came to hand. When that UFO came out, it even got modified from 1/72nd (?) to 1/1000 (!). Also, I know that in the case...

Use Tenax or equivalent. Coming a part will not be a problem. Just use enough solvent so a little gooey styrene squishes out of the joint.

Let dry.

Solid.

That's one of the best general purpose electronics sites - good information on the 4XXX family of CMOS IC's and lots of schematics!

Here's a thread that covers this topic - viewtopic.php?t=56203&highlight=photon+torpedo

Dude! Check the 'stickies' that head this forum for a lot of "Buy THIS" inflamation. Also the threads in this forum have a lot of that kind of info.

Yeah, we really need a "Basics" looonng article, which I had until that last compooter crash....

Speaker wire - to me - is just amber colored "zip cord" or lamp cord, so it should have similar load bearing characteristics for equal wire size - 16 gauge to 24 gauge is common. It handles about any LED load I care to put on it. Fairly flexible, and fairly cheap in 100 foot rolls.

I usually use wire wrap wire for most modeling work, since I use wire wrap a lot. I'll also use "Speaker Wire" for its flexibility, or "Microphone Wire" for it's small size and flexibility (when I can find it!)

And the schematic, fresh from elsewhere in this forum:

http://www.kc6sye.com/images/circuits/4 ... pdated.jpg

That's a 200,000 ohm variable resistance, by the way.

The current - JUNE 09 - issue of the hobbyist magazine "Nuts & Volts" has some excellent articles. One covers wire wrapping - an excellent way to wire up electronical bits for models. One (in the "Arduino" article) covers the Experimenter's Breadboard - how it's built and it'...

SEE! SEE! It takes a dedicated OOB builder like Kylwell to do OOB kits! Properly, anyway. The only OOB I've been able to do in the last few years has been the Apollo 27 kit, and that's only 'cause I just wanted to do SOMETHING quickly. Now I can un-snap it and conver it to 1/48 th scale and add the ...

Think large flat electronic plotting display table. Cool.

If I'm trying to add plastic micro-greeblies to a plastic model I sometimes put some Tenax in a small toothpaste cap (stuck into a blob of modeling clay for stability) then impale the greebly on a pin or something, dip it's bottom into the Tenax, then promptly plunk it onto the model. If it doesn't ...

I bought one of the keychain LCD gadgets for $10 just to tort... um, experiment on. Cheap!

COOL!

COOL!

Next step - you'll be using some of those photo-keychains for real moving LCD displays!

I think what we're saying here is that there are several ways of handling a model lighting project. Some people are more comfortable with one approach, others use different techniques. So people who are starting out might try working in differing ways and see which they like best, and/or which works...

Um, Kitty? I've got some LED display devices that have been plugged in, with a wall mounted power supply - a "wall wart", that have been running continuously for a third of a century: well over 33 YEARS constantly. The often mentioned "Life" of an LED is something like 100,000 ho...

Most excellent!

It's not what you start out with, but how you end up that counts.

Model ON!

Lighting candles now.

Will you require the sacrifice of a (Stief) goat?

I have a 26 page version - "Things that go BLINK in the Night" but it needs updating and expansion.

I've written some books on alternative (green) technology, and being clear and getting the ideas across simply is not easy.

This hobby needs a good 'Blinkification for Beginners' book. Forest Mims has some books and booklets for beginners, and "Electronic Circuits for the Evil Genius" has some good information. You've read all the "announcement"s in this forum, right? Maybe copied and pasted them so y...

You da man, Sparky!

Y're welcome!

en’til Zog First off, a 9 volt battery should be able to run all 3 LEDs in SERIES off of one port. Typically, a GREEN LED will need around 2 to 2.4 volts so 3 in SERIES will use up 6 to 7.2 volts, leaving around 3 down to 1.8 volts needing to be ‘dropped’. Say, 3 volts to be safe, and at 0.020 amps ...

I've found styrene to get brittle - in about 30 years. My worry would be the superglue. A friend and I built a massive model for a film with a PVC pipe spine (which bent with time) and using super glue to hold a lot of bits on. Now, 15-20 years or so later, the superglue has been failing and the shi...